On Thursday, after spending a day with my Grade 6/7 practicum class, I had an interesting moment of reflection – when you’re learning, it’s far easier to focus on your mistakes than to notice your successes.

I had a lesson planned for PE that was going to focus on defence and offence skills.  I did the warm-up activity for the lesson, which went well, and was going to split the kids into teams to play a skills building game when the class started all talking at once saying “We have teams already! We’ve been playing basketball games all week!”  This surprised me since in their previous volleyball unit they did not get to playing full games until many more weeks into the unit, so I asked them what they had learned so far in their basketball games.  They were able to explain several rules and things they had learned to me.  I had learned on my 2 week practicum that sometimes you have to be flexible when the students have a strong interest in something, as you’ll lose them if you try to make them do an activity that they’re not in to.  So with these empowered thoughts I said, “Sure!  Let’s play some basketball!”

However, I didn’t take into account that basketball is a much more technical game and I forgot about one important detail – someone (ie. the teacher, ie. me) needs to be the referee. Although I had played basketball as a kid I remembered nothing of the rules.  The kids got all organized to start playing and I stood there with the ball in my hand thinking “Oh… this is when I’m supposed to do the toss up isn’t it…. How do I do that???” Luckily my practicum teacher noticed my look of “Help!  I’m lost!” and stepped in to referee in my place, but I felt pretty sheepish standing there for the rest of the PE lesson realizing that I had let the kids talk me out of my lesson plan and into something that I didn’t know how to do.

This took over my thoughts for the rest of the day.  I could no longer focus on anything I was doing right – just what I had done wrong.  I dissected the moment over and over during the lunch break, it stayed on my mind while helping a student understand non-fiction paragraph organization, it overshadowed the drama games I lead.  I felt like a failure.  I felt disappointed in myself for stumbling on the one part of the day, when I had the class all to myself to teach, where I was supposed to shine.

Later that day I was still feeling pretty down, but I had an idea for how to start writing down my reflection notes.  I wrote two columns – “things I did well” and “things I didn’t do so well”.  What surprised me was that the “things I did well” column was three times longer than the “things I didn’t do so well” column.  There were many things listed under “things I did well” that I felt proud of.  However, the only thing that was standing out to me was that moment where I made a mistake.  I think this happens to a lot of people when they are learning, including students in our classrooms – you can call yourself a failure based on one moment, but forget all about the other successes you had that show you’re learning and progressing.  Even when you make a mistake, you can always bounce back!  Typically, no one else will linger on a mistake you made longer than your own self – it’s best to take what you learned and move on.  And it’s safe to say I learned something in that moment – being flexible is great, but you have to be mindful of the whole situation you’re stepping into and gauge whether it’s worth it or not.

So with that perspective, yes, I need to unpack my mistakes and figure out where I went wrong so that I can learn from them, but I can’t let my mistakes dictate what kind of teacher I am because there are so many other things I do well.  The point is that I’m learning, growing, and always keeping a positive and nurturing mindset with myself.

–Ms. Park