Tips for Mentoring a Student Teacher - Reflect on Lessons



I hope you enjoyed part 8 of this series about giving feedback to your student teacher.  If you missed it, you can click on the picture above to see all the posts in this series!


It is very important for your student teacher to learn how to reflect on his/her lessons.  You can help with this process by asking him/her to think about what went well and what didn't go so well.  Your student teacher should think about why things went well and why things did not go well.  He/she should try to keep track of the things that went well in order to do the same thing in the future.  Your student teacher should also think about what he/she can do differently in the future.

Your student teacher doesn't need to formally reflect on every single lesson that is taught, but he/she should try to reflect on at least one lesson a day.  You can set up a reflection schedule to make sure that he/she is reflecting on different subjects or just reflect on lessons based on how well they went.

Early on in your student teacher's experience, you should reflect with him/her.  Explain what you thought went well and what needed to be changed.  Try to explain your reasoning as best as you can.

Your student teacher can slowly start the reflection process on his/her own once you know he/she feels comfortable reflecting on all aspects of the lesson.

To go along with these blog posts, I have created a guide.  This guide will be for sale in my TpT store.  It is currently $6.00 in my store!  If you purchase it now, you will be able to get all the updates for free just by downloading it again when I add tips to it.



You might be wondering why you should purchase it since I'll be listing the tips for free here.  Well, in addition to keeping all the tips together in a uniform guide, I will be creating printables that you can use with your own student teacher.  You won't be able to get those here on my blog.

Remember, the price will go up in 2 weeks when I post the next tip here on my blog!

Here's a guide for you so you can see when to expect the tips.



What other reflection tips do you have?


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