Teacher's Reflective Diary

This diary will help you reflect on your own teaching. It suggests things to pay attention to, questions to ask and aspects to ponder. But bear in mind -- it's not a cookbook for good teaching, it is only a guidebook for your own journey.

To supplement your teaching reflection, join the conversation with your fellow teachers. Ask around at your institution for a teaching and learning center or directly engage your colleagues teaching the same course.

If you are from Masaryk University (Czech Republic), you can enroll in the Teaching Lab course at the Faculty of Informatics MUNI to learn more and join the discussion on better teaching.

Diary for download

The compiled version is available at GitHub (see the 'releases' tab). There are two language versions (Czech and English), each in a reading variant and two print variants. The diary is typeset in LaTeX. The included Makefile facilitates the compilation process on Linux-based systems.

How to use the reflective diary?

First and foremost, use it regularly.

Note down your thoughts both when planning the lesson and after delivering it. There are fourteen spreads (one for each semester week), each suggesting a handful of questions. The diary is quite small -- it's partly to keep your notes short.

After the spreads for individual weeks, there is a teacher evaluation rubric, a list of indicators that can be evaluated, a list of some useful teaching tools, and some extra space for your notes and remarks.

Why use the reflective diary?

Regularly using the reflective diary serves multiple purposes:

• It reminds you to reflect on your teaching.
• It provides you with a convenient place to collect notes for the future.
• It helps you see all the different aspects of teaching.
• It enables you to track your progress.

Have any comments or suggestions?

We highly appreciate suggestions for improvement, notes on your experience or any other comments.
Please email us at [email protected].

Publication

Our experience from using the diary is summarized in the following publication:

M. Ukrop, V. Švábenský, J. Nehyba, Reflective Diary for Professional Development of Novice Teachers, in Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE), 2019.

The article is available in the ACM Digital Library. You can also access the preprint in the ArXiv repository or directly view the PDF.

Authors

This diary was created by Martin Ukrop, Ondráš Přibyla, Valdemar Švábenský and Martin Macák for the course Teaching Lab at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University with cooperation of the Masaryk University Language Centre.

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.