Annual Reflection on Professional Learning 2013

Policy GBI of my district requires each educator to submit evidence of reflection on practice, or Annual Reflections on Professional Learning (ARPLs). They are meant to reflect a public collective dialogue about teaching and learning, Apart from the obligatory conversation with my administrator, there wasn't much more to it than that. In fact, and I can see the reason for this as some teachers' ARPL's may be much more personal, the documents are "kept by the teacher in a secure location and will be accessed only under the teacher's direction."

Last year I made the decision to use a publicly accessible blog for my ARPL partly to make the process more authentic by engaging in more regular and thoughtful reflections on teaching and learning, and partly to extend the conversation beyond the bounds of my school district. In addition, a blog post written a couple of years ago is still in active circulation unlike the artifacts in my personnel file.

So here is my ARPL, a summary of the previous year's blog posts.

Almost 60 blog posts were published in the last year: book summaries, reflections on conversations, experiences with technology integration, experiments and research into emerging technologies, epiphanies, stories, etc. All serve to reflect my professional engagement, learning, sharing, opinions, and reflections. In addition to the 60 published posts, I have more than 90 in the draft queue many, I'm sure, will never be fully developed, but all are born of reflective practice and participation in my profession.

My hit counter shows more than ten-thousand visitors in the last year with visits from more than 150 different countries. While this is nice knowing others are reading my reflections, I appreciate the conversations that arise. More than 60 comments have generated some kind of dialogue between me and the visitor. Hundreds more than that take place on Twitter as I and others continue to share the blog contents and talk about teaching and learning.

There are links on this page for each month showing how many blog posts were made. Clicking the link will list that month's posts. I invite everyone who read a post to comment: ask a question, challenge a statement, offer guidance, or share a story. If you have a blog, please share so I can hear what you have to say too.

Respectfully submitted
Miles MacFarlane

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