Personal Narrative: My Experience As A Future Educator Hendricks Statement

As a future educator Hendricks statement, “Experience does not necessarily make you better; in fact it tends to make you worse, unless it’s evaluated experience” (Hendricks, 1987, p. 35) for me means simply that experience without critical self-reflection and analysis leads to a lack of personal and professional growth, learning, change, and development. Additionally, it may lead toward a lack of awareness for others, self, and community which is not a characteristic representative of my Christian faith. Furthermore, if I experience something and base all my beliefs and understandings upon the experience with assessing multiple points of view, how it relates to my core values and beliefs, if the event should form the rest of my perception about the experience, I end up become close-minded to other growth opportunities and much more. For example, suppose I have a particularly terrible experience implementing a lesson based on Teams-Games-Tournaments strategy only to find it ineffective for accomplishing the learning objective. Without the use of evaluating the experience for what was and was not effective but instead decide based on the one event to never utilize it again, I fail to minimize options for utilizing a teaching strategy that very well could be effective or redeveloped based on findings from the act of evaluating the experience.

35) comes to fruition without individual evaluation of the teaching experience, thus closing the door for adapting or developing of something