Reflection & Goals

As I'm working on my edTPA and reflecting on my first placement and the lessons I taught, I've been thinking about some of the lessons I learned that I want to keep in mind moving forward. I'm setting a few goals for myself for my second placement:

1. Ask more questions!!! I hate to say this, but I think I missed a lot of learning opportunities by not asking all the questions that popped into my head during my first placement. There were so many things that I didn't ask my FM or other teachers, either because it wasn't the right time and I forgot later, or because I just thought it was a stupid question (like, what is SIOP?? I should know that, right? But I don't). I think I was so focused on the "teaching" part of student teaching and trying to seem professional, that it was easy to forget that I'm still a student, too, and I need to be learning these kinds of things as I go. I'm going to make a point of asking my next FM as many questions as possible, big or small, to make sure I'm maximizing the opportunity for myself and learning as much as possible.
2. Force myself to have my lesson plans and materials ready 24 hours in advance. Yep, this is a requirement. Am I the only one who had trouble sticking to it? :\ Sometimes, it wasn't really "my fault" and there was no way I could write the lesson plan more than a day ahead of time for whatever reason, but a lot of the time, it was me procrastinating. At first I thought the "24-hour rule" was for the FMs' benefit, and mine didn't seem to mind just talking about each day's lessons the morning of. But I finally realized I was doing myself a disservice by getting behind, because I probably missed out on some valuable feedback that I could have gotten if my FM had more time to review my lessons. That, and I maybe would've gotten more sleep if I'd made a habit of staying one step ahead of myself. So, moving forward into my second placement, I'm going to do everything in my power to stay ahead, and make it a habit for when I have my own classroom.
3. Stop saying "um" when I'm teaching. You know when you watch yourself teaching on video and some things just make you cringe? This was it for me. Must stop.

What were some of the biggest lessons y'all learned from your first placement? What are your goals moving forward?