Example Of A Personal Reflection

While earning my undergraduate degree, I had a formative internship as a visit monitor at a court-appointed family visitation center. I ensured that children could interact with their parent in a way that was safe, appropriate, and healthy for the child’s physical and emotional health. The families that I monitored had often endured traumatic experiences, particularly related to abuse, neglect, addiction, and mental illness. I witnessed the resiliency and risk factors that impacted these children, who ranged in age from infancy to adolescence. At the same time, I was struck by the fact that many of these children were not receiving the intervention services they likely needed to prevent negative outcomes, such as depression and anxiety, from …show more content…
Mary Louise Hemmeter, as a research assistant for a project designed to prevent challenging behaviors in schools. The teachers who are part of the project participated in a professional development intervention, which focused on effectively integrating curricula and experiences to stimulate children’s learning of social-emotional skills. My role has been to assess the fidelity of teachers’ application of these lessons and the severity of challenging behaviors in their classrooms. Throughout this longitudinal study, I have realized the influence that thoughtfully and appropriately designed and implemented professional development opportunities for teachers can have on the classroom environment. Furthermore, this project was my first exposure to a prevention study. I appreciated the strengths-based perspective of increasing social-emotional skills, rather than focusing solely on decreasing challenging behaviors. This experience also reinforced my understanding of the positive impact that teachers can have on their students, especially when they are equipped with developmentally appropriate tools and skills, drawn from research that demonstrates the effectiveness of evidenced-based …show more content…
I am a research assistant on an additional professional development project in which teachers are trained to integrate specialized instruction in their classrooms for children with developmental delays. As part of this study, my responsibilities include collecting child outcome data through administering assessments of children’s early literacy, speech, and general academic skills. Additionally, I am involved in coding videos of classroom interactions and experiences, assessing child engagement in order to determine whether teachers’ implementation of this individualized instruction increases children’s participation in classroom activities. Through this experience, I have become familiar with the process of conducting research within a school setting and the protocols and procedures that must be followed as a result. Since working on the project, my duties have expanded to include training other data collectors as well, ensuring that they administer these assessments correctly and with fidelity and continuously monitoring their reliability throughout this process. In addition to my increased research and training skills, this practicum experience has allowed me also to reflect on how much I enjoy working with a research team, as well as with students and teachers from diverse