Missy Rankin

May 24th, 2016

Metro RESA Gifted Endorsement Self Reflection Assessment for

Curriculum and Strategies for the Gifted Learner

Part I-B:
1. What have you learned about yourself as a teacher as you
have experimented with new strategies?
This year, I have learned how to be pushed out of my
comfort zone with respect to lesson strategies. I was asked
to implement several lessons using strategies I had never
seen in action nor did I understand. By doing this, it allowed
me to learn about my comfort and flexibility with teacher.
It reminded me the importance of going with the flow and
being flexible as a teacher. It also allowed me to give away
some control as I know I am a control freak.
2. Discuss such things as your level of comfort, how did you deal
with the risk factors in trying something new, how did you
prepare your students to try something new, how did you
include colleagues in helping you with your experiments?
One of the ways I dealt with the risk of trying something
new is looking to my colleagues for help. I have always been
the kind of person who will do everything myself. This TAG
class forced me to look to others for assistance. Jennifer
Newman has been an instrumental force in my success in
this class. We work on all of the assignments with one
another to reinforce that we know what to do. I dont know
if I would have been able to create all these lesson plans
without being able to bounce ideas off her! Many times I
just threw my students into the new activity instead of

Missy Rankin
May 24th, 2016
giving them a lot of upfront prep. By scaffolding the
students into it, they had more engagement and buy in.
3. Has anything surprised or amazed you about yourself and
others who have been involved?
I was truly amazed at the feedback I received from Amy
Cousin while she observed me implementing the lessons. She
gave valuable feedback that I was able to use when
conducting future lessons. This feedback was valuable as
well because she was able to observe for the entire lesson
unlike when administrators conduct walk through
evaluations. I surprised myself by enjoying having a
colleague who I am friends with come into the classroom. I
did not feel as if I had to put on a show, I let the kids do
the hard work to impress
Part II:
Strengths: I wouldnt say that any of these characteristics on that list
are my strengths. The following ones I selected are areas that I
believe I am working on making my strength.
1. I feel like I have greatly improved on coming up with effective
strategies that incorporate creativity and critical thinking into
the classroom. With Language Arts, it is very easy to make room
for creativity. This year, I used many different projects and
activities that fostered creativity from service learning, having
the students design their own project, book talk projects, and so
much more. I pushed my students with critical thinking through
many different ways. One example would be the Costas levels of
questioning.

Missy Rankin
May 24th, 2016
2. I feel that I have greatly improved on the use of strategies
that formatively assess student understanding this year as
well. I used RACES, ticket out the door, ipad scan warm ups, book
talk projects, mini-assessments, kahoot, and quizizz. I feel like I
really improved on tracking my progress this year with my
students which helped me to better formatively assess my
students.
Weakness: aka area of growth
1. One weakness that I plan to work on next year is questioning to
encourage deeper thinking. I feel like there are some days that I
do this well, but other days our questions just skim the surface. I
think that I can push the questions deeper by incorporating more
of the Costas levels of questioning and more HOT questions. I
have a HOT question bucket that I did not use as much as I
should have this year, so I plan to continue my growth with this
next year.

Part III:
One of the strategies that I have implemented this semester was
the six thinking hats strategy. From implementing this lesson, I learned
that sometimes changes need to be made to the strategy during
implementation. For example, the times given to students to complete
the discussion were too long for some of the hats and not long enough
for other hats.
Another strategy that I implemented this semester was the task
rotation. My students really enjoyed this lesson because it gave them
the opportunity to select a task that is specific to their learning type.
It allowed students to reflect on the novel they were reading. This

Missy Rankin
May 24th, 2016
strategy reminded me of think-tac-toes or menu board projects. What
my students enjoyed about task rotation though, was that it could be a
smaller scale assignment.
One strategy that I wish I had had time to implement this year
was the mystery lesson. I thought this strategy was super engaging and
interesting. I know my 6th grade students would have enjoyed it
because there is a lot of buy in with it. I would like to implement this
strategy in the future at the beginning of a novel study to get the
students more excited about the novel. One example of this type of
lesson could be before we begin Lupita Manana. I would pose the
mystery to the students about farm workers have long term health
problems- type 2 diabetes, back problems, lung problems, etc. Students
would have to ask inquiry questions to determine why these health
problems are occurring.