When you think about it, teachers teach students through the material by taking out the time to getting to know them and how to actually motivate them. I call this setting up a “live curriculum.”
There are just so many things about writing a lesson plan that is dynamic that you can only learn this on your own. Reflective teaching is applying classroom theory and coming up with your own recipes for motivating students and building effective instruction.
In the early days of teaching, I chose to not absorb myself with the pressure of standarized testing, rather to observe students and how they interacted with the material. I loved to watch them in various classroom activities, interacting during pair and group work activities, listening to how they read and what they said to each other. I described these experiences in my teacher journal, which actually motivated me to plan the next few lessons.
It became much easier to be more spontaneous in the classroom.Years down the line, students won’t remember the grammar tense or the laboratory terms you just taught, but who you are and meant for them as a teacher.
