Improving Your Teaching Practice Through Systematic Reflection

The teaching profession is unique in that every school year provides a clean slate—a fresh opportunity for students and teachers alike. But once it gets rolling, the full-steam-ahead nature of the school year doesn’t allow much time for teachers to pause, reflect, and collect new ideas. 

It seems that some of the best and most important teaching work actually occurs when we are not teaching, but instead reflecting on learning. Taking a systematic approach to reflection throughout the school year, and using tools to capture those reflections, can help us increase our capacity and accelerate our professional growth. 

Here are some effective ways to optimize your next school year by collecting, reflecting on, and organizing ideas throughout this school year. Your future self will thank you. 

A tool for reflection

I like to use a strategy called “Stop-Start-Continue” to guide my reflection on a unit, semester, or year. Credited to psychology professor Phil Daniels and adapted for various classroom uses by Jennifer Manly, it’s a reflection and feedback process consisting of three simple questions: What do I want to stop doing? What could I start doing? What should I continue doing or building on? 

Taking the time to identify things that went well, in addition to ineffective or unproductive approaches, creates space to better consider new ideas. Of course, there are many things teachers don’t get to make decisions about, but I’ve found that this strategy helps me see past those things to focus on all that I can do and change in my classroom. 

There’s no need to wait until the middle or end of the year to use this tool. In fact, it’s handy to use with students throughout the school year to take stock, make changes, and set goals. I pose these questions to my students and consider their responses alongside my own (What actions or activities should our class stop doing because they’re not having the intended outcome or are creating confusion or distraction? What could our class start doing to move closer to our goals? What effective activities or approaches should we continue?). 

Prioritize Documentation

As any veteran teacher or parent will tell you, you don’t remember half of what you think you will. It’s typically too much to try to hold all of these reflections in your mind, so record them somewhere. The place and format matters far less than the act of simply doing it. I keep a running digital document titled “For Next Year” and pin it to the top of my Drive, and I link slides to that document that show a compilation of students’ input from “Stop-Start-Continue.” 

Some of my colleagues use the comment function in their lesson plans to write notes to their future selves (e.g., “Do this again next year, but make it a gallery walk instead!”). The key is to set aside regular time for recording your reflections in a designated place so that once the new school year begins, you’ve got a strong starting point from which to plan. 

Start from strengths

Teachers are notoriously hard on ourselves. We can typically identify every mistake, missed opportunity, or botched response in every lesson we execute. Even though starting from strengths is often the best way to support growth and momentum, we can struggle to identify the successes in our practice. So this next point is key for effective, reflective practice: Notice when it goes right. 

Don’t reserve all reflective capacity for the days that don’t go as planned. It’s easy to notice errors but more challenging—and more impactful—to reflect on successes. Pause and notice when things go right, and attempt to capture why. Chances are, you set the stage for success through deliberate decisions that resulted in high levels of student learning. Determine what students responded to so positively. Increased physical movement? Expanded student choice? A particularly engaging topic, approach, or activity? 

Reflect beyond curriculum

When reflecting on successful lessons, we can sometimes focus too heavily on the content or curriculum, but we should also reflect on the pedagogical approaches that laid the foundation for a successful lesson to occur. For instance, we know that positive classroom cultures don’t just happen. Rather, it’s a series of intentional teacher moves, some tacit even to us, that create an environment in which students can learn at their highest levels. 

The most challenging task of the reflective practitioner is to make that tacit knowledge explicit. Data show us results and are a good place to start for determining what worked. But we shouldn’t stop there. When we aim to answer the question “What made this work?” or “Why was this effective?” we can identify and replicate successful practices. Simply looking at student achievement data isn’t the same as reflecting on the teaching that resulted in it. 

Collaborate if you can

As with everything in education, it’s better in collaboration. If you have the ability to join reflective forces with colleagues, you will almost certainly have more and better ideas for the next school year—or possibly the next semester or unit. Researchers Richard DuFour and colleagues wrote, “On highly effective collaborative teams, each individual member benefits from the talent and expertise of the other members to the point where the entire team is more effective, more productive, and more impactful than any individual teacher could ever hope to be by themselves” (Learning by Doing). Each individual team member benefits from the reflections of other members, increasing the capacity of the whole team. 

Plus, if we build into our collaborative time a systematic approach to reflecting on learning, it’s less likely that we’ll be in the position of building the plane while flying it the next year. Having already determined what works well and weeded out what doesn’t, we’re more free during the school year to adjust and respond to students’ specific needs.