Final Writing Circle Reflection

Today I will wrap up and reflect on my writing circle group this session.  Overall, writing circles were very helpful for me and were a beneficial way to get opinions and critiques on my thoughts and ideas.  It was nice to hear what other people had to say about my blog posts and I enjoyed getting feedback, whether it was agreeing or disagreeing with what I had to say. It was important for me to be able to accept any criticism on my blog posts and use this to either make changes to my ideas or if I still did not agree, to accept that not everyone will have the same beliefs and that this is perfectly okay.  The writing circle groups helped me to discover my topic for this research paper and encouraged me to come up with different ways that I could go about researching it.  I feel that the other group members would say that we did the same for them, as well.  Our group got along very well and had a lot of conversations that I was able to learn from.  These conversations were a great way for me to think about things in another way or in several ways, which is very important for a teacher to be able to do.  I enjoyed reading the blogs of my group members and felt that I took something from reading each of those, too.  I have always been a fan of small groups in class and I think that having these small groups made the class much more interesting and also allowed for us to meet new people and get to know them better.

Each member in our group chose different topics to research which taught me a lot about different topics.  Everyone also had different opinions on education and had different experiences throughout their education.  This was important for me since I got to reflect on my educational experiences and think about how my education may have been different, or how I may be different, if I were to have had different experiences in my life.  For example, I thought about how much different it would have been for me if I had gone to Catholic school my whole life.  When I thought about this, I realized the importance that public schools have had on my life...which then led me to my research topic.  Throughout this class, I was able to put myself in other situation as well, such as how my life would be different if I had been African American or another race, if I had been raised in a poor family, or if I had been a woman at a time when women's rights did not yet exist.  As I put myself in each of these situations, I thought about the diversity that will exist in my classroom and that I must be able to imagine myself in each one of my student's places before making any judgements.  This class was a major influence on my ability to do this which I think has made me a more accepting and understanding person...which will lead to me becoming a better teacher.  Working with Courtney, Kara, and Andrew helped me to get even more out of this class and because of this, I plan to include small group sessions often in my classes when I become a teacher.