How do you Reflect and Improve on Your Teaching?

At the end of each school year, I take time to reflect, what went well that I want to do again, what didn’t go well and how can I change it? While I did this when I taught in person, I do it even more since I teach online.

With online teaching and learning, the videos, instructions, and content are already created, making it the perfect platform to make small adjustments to each year so that it gets better every time.

I’m ending my 6th year teaching online, some of the things that I’ve changed over the years are:

• Switching from the course on my website to using zippy courses plugin to better organize information
• Providing assignments by the week to breaking them down to activities for each day. This helps students better manage their time.
• Changing from Google Hangout to Zoom for class calls
• Not having due dates, having everything due on Sunday, then having everything due on Friday’s
• Adding content to AP Art History that teaches students how to take notes
• Adding optional information and videos to better differentiate the learning

I’m sure that this is more, but that’s all that I can remember right now. Whether teaching in-person or online, it’s important to know that it’s never going to be perfect, and you can’t change everything at once. Make small and intentional changes over time, and you’ll see a big impact.

The biggest thing that I’m focusing on now, is repetition. When learning new things, it needs to be repeated and presented in new and varying ways. This is already part of my online Art Classes, and I think that it can better. I’m reflecting on the common questions that students ask, and thinking about where and when I can add additional information and support to better address these questions.

If students ask the same questions over and over, instead of thinking that they aren’t listening, ask yourself if there are different ways that you can present the information.

In AP Drawing and AP 2D Design this year, I’ve found that I’m getting a lot of questions about what to submit for the final portfolio, part of that is because the requirements just changed last month, and I still think I can add better supports.

As I create new summer online art courses and updated my AP courses, I’m going to be adding more checklist, that helps students, at a glance, to be able to look through what they need to do each week. Checklist can be really helpful especially for students that are dyslexic, struggle with anxiety, have trouble with reading comprehension or have ADHD.

I just created a checklist to help with submission for the AP Portfolio, you can grab a copy here.