Journaling has a critical role to play as you move through your clinical practice. Journaling provides opportunities for you to reflect on the contextual factors of the school, and your understanding of the occurrences that you observe; it is not a repository for minute-to-minute recording of incidents. Further, journaling promotes your ability to reflect on your experiences in and out of the P – 12 classroom, and to share your impressions of the events in which you engage with faculty who are entrusted with your guidance and supervision. Journal Expectations Timeliness: Teacher candidate submits weekly journal entries as requested without reminders. Critical Thinking: Teacher candidate responds to journal prompts with substantial information demonstrating 1) application of knowledge, 2) connections between experience and content taught in preparation program. Substantive Entry: Teacher candidate submits organized and logically sequenced journal and reflection responses. The entry contains detailed information, connections and reflections of experience. Writing: Teacher candidate communicates effectively in writing using correct grammar, punctuation and spelling. Reflection: Teacher candidate deeply reflects on his/her own practice with evidence of analysis, synthesis or evaluation. Provides detailed examples and makes connections between practice, research and theory. Instructions: 1. Use the weekly template, linked below, to respond to the journal and reflection writing prompt.2. Save (Save As) your journal entry in a location where you will be able to retrieve it for submission and reference. 3. E-mail your weekly journal entry as an attachment to your clinical supervisor. Submit your journal entries as requested by your seminar instructor.4. Write your journal entry using academic language. Proof read your work. Remember: Do not use student, teacher or other staff names in any journal entry. The journal is used to build an understanding of community, school and classroom factors; and to provide an opportunity to reflect on your professional practice and observations. It is not appropriate to pass judgement. Each journal and reflection prompt supports candidates’ growth in the COE Competencies and are tagged with the competency(s) and/or tasks to which they are aligned. Clinical Practice II Journal Expectations and Prompts Week Clinical Practice II Journal Prompts Week 1 Journal Prompt: What were the three instructional goals you identified during Clinical Practice I? Reflect on the progress you made on these goals. What are the three instructional goals you have identified for Clinical Practice II? How do you plan on addressing them? Week 2 Journal Prompt: Discuss with your clinical educator how your responsibilities will evolve and increase with your full-time clinical across the semester. Share details about the plan. Please be specific. (C15) Week 3 Journal Prompt: How do you and your clinical educator learn, research, and then utilize the interests, strengths, and needs of your students? How does this information influence your instructional planning to develop a responsive and inclusive classroom climate for students of diverse cultural backgrounds and perspectives? (C1 and C3) Week 4 Journal Prompt: Identify at least three specific, diverse student learning needs and the instructional strategies you implemented to meet those needs. What evidence demonstrates the strategies effectiveness or ineffectiveness? If a strategy was not as effective as you anticipated, what would you do differently? (C11) Week 5 Journal Prompt: Reflect on how learning goals, expectations, evaluation, and feedback has been shared with you for courses and clinical. What are the strategies used to share this information. What strategies are most effective for you? How do you use your understanding and experiences of how learning goals, evaluation, and feedback is shared in your P-12 classroom? (C10) Week 6 Journal Prompt: Reflect on how learning goals, expectations, evaluation, and feedback has been shared with you for courses and clinical. What are the strategies used to share this information. What strategies are most effective for you? Which successful strategies for sharing evaluation feedback have you attempted to use with your own students in your P-12 classroom? (C10) Week 7 Journal Prompt: Designing learning objectives, success criteria (i.e., evaluation criteria/ rubric elements), and appropriate assessments can be challenging. Provide an example of objectives, success criteria, and assessment for a lesson, study, mini-unit, or unit that you believe aligned well. Explain how the assessment measures the objectives and success criteria how students were supported to meet the success criteria. (C5 and C8) Week 8 Journal Prompt: Probing and eliciting learners’ responses requires many techniques (rephrasing using students’ response, wait time, affirmation). To deepen learners’ understanding we must vary questioning strategies. Reflect on your growth as an educator during your clinical work. How have your questioning strategies changed and/or developed? (C12) Week 9 Journal Prompt: Reflect on learning experiences your designed. How have you stimulated prior knowledge, linked new ideas to familiar ideas and experiences, and made content connections to the real world. (C6) Week 10 Journal Prompt: Select one lesson you taught. Look carefully at the data from one assessment (formal or informal). Considering the objective this assessment was designed to measure, describe the performance of the whole class. Focus on one student’s performance. How did the data inform your decision making regarding the next steps in teaching to meet students’ needs? Describe your next steps to support this student’s meeting of the learning objective (i.e. additional supports; reteaching; flexible grouping; scaffolding material) (C9) Week 11 Journal Prompt: Identify a multi-day series of lessons with multiple objectives and a summative assessment. Analyze and interpret the summative assessment data against the multiple objectives. What did you learn about student performance and your teaching? What would you keep the same? What would you do differently? (C13 and C14) Week 12 Journal Prompt: Being a teacher is more that planning and teaching lessons. Teachers are a member of a profession that requires professional decision making and behaviors based on school/district policies, laws, and standards of the profession. Identify one professional decision or behavior that you have encountered that might have been new or challenged you. Explain your decision-making thought process. Why did you make the decision you made. (C16) Week 13 Journal Prompt: Reflect on how you integrated modifications, accommodations and/or differentiated instruction to which students responded well. Identify what instructional resources, tools, technologies and/or instructional strategies you used and why they were effective. What resources, tools, technologies and/or instructional strategies would you not use again with this group of students? (C2 and C4) Week 14 Journal Prompt:What were the three instructional goals you identified at the beginning of clinical practice II? Reflect on the progress you made on these goals or how the goals changed.
