Encouraging Student Teachers to Document Reflective Practice

Tomás Galguera, a CASTL scholar and Mills College teacher educator, is among the first scholars to use the snapshot tool not only to document his own teaching but to enable his students to show their learning. Currently, Galguera is using the snapshot tool to document and assess his students’ learning from inquiries of their own teaching. The students are creating snapshots to explore and exchange their experiences as elementary school pre-service teachers of English Language Development. The snapshots included a description of pre-service teachers’ school settings, an investigation of one student’s learning, and a summary of the entire inquiry, with some results and reflections.

Anna Belkin's Teaching Snapshots




Talon Deatrick's Teaching Snapshots

The student snapshots were created from templates that were designed with specific guiding questions to communicate the student’s teaching experience. Each student created three snapshots. The first snapshot documents the English Language Learning resources available at the school where the pre-service teachers conducted their teaching. The second snapshot documents a particular student’s English language learning experience at this school. The third snapshot allows the student teachers to communicate the context of their teaching, their specific teaching goals and curriculum plans, as well as to provide an assessment of both their students’ learning and their own teaching.

Once each student had created a snapshot, they were shared in an online gallery and peer reviewed using a web-based collaborative authoring tool called a wiki. In this way, the students were able to share their experiences and discuss related resources quickly and easily. As seen in comments in the wiki, sharing the snapshots allowed the students to learn from each other’s experience and gave them greater perspective on the condition of English language development in San Francisco Bay Area elementary schools. Students also acquired greater understanding of language learners’ needs and teachers’ strategies for meeting those needs. “I've chosen to have my students do snapshots instead of writing papers for most assignments. Doing so allows me to have them look at each other's work, analyze it, and learn from it. This is especially useful given that these assignments are inquiry-driven”, said Galguera of his decision to use the KEEP Toolkit.

The Keep Toolkit supported teacher inquiry by allowing pre-service teachers to represent stages of their work in an engaging way. Teachers were able to link to school websites, attach student work, and provide visually stimulating images. This multilayered approach enriched the presentation of teachers’ work, inviting substantive comments and comparisons. Galguera’s pre-service teachers were also able to continue revising their snapshots beyond their due date, with several of them deciding to build a professional portfolio they can use long after they leave Galguera’s classroom.

Galguera also piloted the KEEP Toolkit with a small cohort of colleagues in early 2004 to document and share inquiry into their teaching practice. Results from this pilot effort were shared with Mills faculty at a technology fair in June 2004. This work is part of a concerted Mills initiative towards creating a campus Center for Teaching Excellence.

Add the Teaching Inquiry template to your KEEP Toolkit account