Reflectiveness

Reflection is a hard thing because people don't like to self critique.  Looking back at something you did and seeing where you made faults is a difficult thing to do. After you take a test, you don't want to go back through the test and see which ones you got wrong because you wish that you would have gotten them right.  The same goes for teachers, we wish that things would have gone the right way but they don't always go as planned.  Teachers have to understand that things don't always go as planned and we need to be flexible and learn from our mistakes. 
The reason that it's important to reflect is that reflection is the best way to learn from your mistakes.  If you see that something didn't go well, reflecting on the situation and how things played out is a great way to learn what went wrong and where.  If a student was misbehaving in class and you ended up sending the student to the principal to be dealt with, looking back on that situation would be valuable because you could find ways to deal with that situation in your own class next time.  The principal will appreciate your efforts to keep students out of the office and control your own class.  This will bring integrity to the classroom because other students will see a teacher that can have control and keep his or her students in line.
I reflect most effectively by having a minute to just sit and think after the time I spend in the 5th grade classrooms or tutoring my student, Cameron.  I just sit and think about the time I spent  teaching and tutoring, how things went good and if things went wrong how they happened.  I think about how I handled the situation this time, and try to think how I could have done things differently.