Developing a teaching philosophy and Teaching Action Plan

Not much to report on the Mobile Learning this week apart from the fact that I have a great looking microphone and a good desktop stand for it. Very happily I received good feedback in last week's reflection for Mobile Learning, that I had written clear deep reflections giving me a firm foundation on which to build my Mobile learning activity. This gave me a great deal of satisfaction particularly since while reading it over, I began making notes to myself where I thought I needed to be more specific about what I was trying to get across. I think this is that thing called meta-reflection. I haven't even tried the microphone out yet, as it has been all about developing my teaching philosophy and writing an action plan for professional development. Both sound a lot easier than they seem at first sight...

I'll share all of this when I have my marks back. Suffice to say after having done the teaching perspective inventory in the past fortnight I am quite comfortable with the fact that I seem to be sailing on an even keel. It's nice to think I have found a certain equilibrium within my teaching self. That allows me to see what I want to improve based on student successes and struggles, without feeling the need to chastise myself over my 'failings' as it is not necessarily anything I have done wrong rather than that I would see things needing to be changed. The action plan began writing itself purely with what I wanted to achieve from the student's perspective. At some point today I realised that there needed to be a lot more about what I want to achieve as a practitioner so another hunt for teaching action plan templates ensued. With a bit of tweaking I now feel as if I am developing a plan that will improve my delivery as well as the student experience. The background work will be the most demanding. I have a busy month ahead of me getting the templates all organised and using the screen casting software - that also needs to be storyboarded so I have a good guide for what needs to be accomplished. Formulating what needs to be improved from two perspectives has been quite useful in that I have a more clear idea of what work needs to be done and how much will need to be rewritten - that I will try to minimise since there is limited time and I want to spend more on developing the screen casts. Suddenly I have more than one in mind - I knew that would happen but was hoping that the ideas would wait a bit longer - perhaps a few static screen shots via a website will be a good substitute? Does that mean I have to develop a Wix website as well now?

Let's keep it simple. Start with a storyboard and go from there.

There are some great visuals and concepts forming both in my head and on paper, yet also a lot of empty spaces around them that need to be filled in to complete the whole scenario. With time and thought that will happen.

Goals for next week:

1. assignment to be submitted on Monday
2. prioritise what needs to be worked on next - the action plan will help with that. There will be a fair amount of tandem projects 
3. refine this journal and write a new summary for Teaching in Action for next Saturday's class. This week's blog post will help me out.

Let's see how the reflective writing comes along - shall I make a new wordle again? I guess it depends on what terms and concepts I come across in the next few days. Oooh, I could put this into a Word Sift and see how that turns out.