Waiting to Learn and Learning to Wait: An Autoethnographic Metareflection on Journaling as a Reflective Teaching Practice

Ana Palomino

Abstract

In this autoethnographic metareflection, the author, an English as a Second Language (ESOL) teacher, demonstrates how she is working to develop a personalized and systematic approach to journaling as a reflective teaching practice. A self-identified “crisis journaler” for over two decades, the author argues that her journal entries, filled with vented frustrations and attempts to figure out life’s challenges, are part of a professional ongoing, long-term data collection process. The author shows how keeping written records of her experiences has produced the important documents that can now facilitate her personal and professional reflection. Using multiple approaches, the author models how a teacher’s journal entries can be transformed into interactive data for a teacher to learn from, interpret, analyze, and share with others. Analyzing data that emerges from her journals offers a teacher valuable insight into her own thinking and decision-making in the classroom. Exploring both her own journal entries and the published literature on reflection, the author attempts to negotiate and refine her personal and ever evolving understanding of what reflective teaching is and how to do it with a journal.