Underpinning the journal is the Reflective Cycle—a concept Pete and Alisa (along with Bryan Goodwin, Bj Stone, and Bess Scott) also explored in Pursuing Greatness: Empowering Teachers to Take Charge of Their Professional Growth.
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Be your own best coach and mentor
Develop reflective habits to help you focus on your goals, improve what needs improving, and celebrate what you’ve gotten right.
Have you ever written in a journal or diary before? This is pretty much the same, except it’s focused on your work as a professional educator. The Journal gives you weekly open-ended writing prompts crafted to help you develop new habits of thinking. In repeated succession, you’ll progress through these themes:
- WOW weeks: Something went well in your teaching this week (it did!). Let’s celebrate it, and then think about why it’s important to you and how you can replicate it.
- YIKES weeks: Mistakes happen. Turn one into a powerful learning opportunity and plan for a positive outcome next time.
- GOAL weeks: Identify a particular outcome you want to achieve—and how you’re going to achieve it.
- QUESTION weeks: What do you need to know about your students, your professional responsibilities, or education in general?
- TACKLE A FEAR WEEK: Is something holding you back? Confront it and watch your capacity for success increase.
After everything you’ve invested in your career, A Teacher’s Reflective Impact Journal might be the best value you’ve ever found: Just $14.95 for a year-long peer coach you can carry with you everywhere!
PRINCIPALS AND DISTRICT LEADERS: Give your entire teaching team the gift of self-reflection and journaling. Bulk discounts are available with purchase orders for 10 or more copies:
- 10% off orders of 1-49 journals
- 15% off orders of 50-99 journals
- 20% off orders of 100 or more
Send your purchase orders to store@mcrel.org
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About the Authors
Mary Smith
Mary Smith is a former teacher and curriculum specialist who speaks, coaches, writes, podcasts, and wonders about ways that we can amplify our role as educators.
Pete Hall
Pete Hall is a former teacher and school principal who now writes, provides professional development for educators, and dabbles in motivational speaking.
Alisa Simeral
Alisa is a former teacher and instructional coach who travels the globe supporting educators at all levels to become the light that all of our students need.
Resources & Services
Videos
How journaling supports educator reflection and growth
Pete Hall, co-author of A Teacher’s Reflective Impact Journal shares seven key ways that journaling can help educators self-reflect on their professional practices and have a bigger impact on student outcomes.
Weekly themes to help your self-reflective journaling
Co-author Pete Hall talks about the weekly themes in the Reflective Impact Journal that help educators think and write about what’s working in their classrooms, what’s not, and what they’d like to change.
Can journaling still help if I’m teaching online?
Mary Smith, co-author of A Teacher’s Reflective Impact Journal shares why journaling about our online teaching experiences can help us bring clarity to this challenging situation and find successful strategies faster.
How journaling can help PLCs and teacher teams
While many teachers will use the Reflective Impact Journal by themselves to improve their own individual practices, co-author Mary Smith describes how PLCs and teacher teams can use the journal together to collaborate, share, and learn with peers.
Additional Resources & Services
Breakthrough Teaching
Quick Guide Series for Teachers
Good teachers use effective teaching strategies in their classrooms while great ones, the breakthrough-level teachers whose students make significant growth each year, know when and why to use specific instructional strategies to meet their students’ needs. This series of 8-page quick guides gives teachers evidence-based insights and tips on how to elevate their instructional practices to better capture student interest and more consistently engage students in deep, memorable, applicable learning.
PLANNING FOR LEARNING
ASSESSING FOR LEARNING
Pursuing Greatness
Empowering Teachers to Take Charge of Their Professional Growth
Pursuing Greatness organizes two dozen of the most common teacher problems of practice into six pathways and provides teachers with self-reflection guidance and tools to solve them. You’ll gain research-based insights into why each strategy works, tips for how and when to apply it, and an opportunity to reflect on how it affects your teaching and your students’ learning.
McREL BOOKSTORE
Classroom Instruction That Works®
Drawing on multiple, highly rigorous studies and insights from the world of cognitive science, McREL’s Classroom Instruction That Works (CITW) books, resources, and professional learning services give educators 14 of the best Tier 1 universal instructional strategies shown to significantly improve student learning, along with guidance for developing stronger lesson plans and units of study that capture student interest, encourage their self-motivation to learn, and help them develop deep understanding.