5 Questions to Tackle When Reflecting on Teaching
Reflecting on teaching means deliberately reviewing your lessons, your relationships with students, and your own growth so patterns don't repeat by accident. The strongest teachers build it into daily, weekly, and end-of-year routines, not just after something goes wrong. A short list of guiding questions, asked consistently, does more for your practice than an occasional deep dive.
"May the Force be with you!"
Almost as commanding as the Force, do you use the power of reflective thinking? The ability to reflect effectively can help a teacher both personally and professionally.
Reflection is one of the most underused tools a teacher has. Some see it as too time-consuming, or as an outright waste of time, and end up missing the chance to confirm or change their practice. When a teacher's schedule gets busy, the time set aside to reflect is usually the first thing cut. That's backwards: skipping reflection often means spending more time later fixing problems that a few minutes of review would have caught. Teachers who make time to review their lessons regularly may find it easier to avoid repeating the same problems.
Building some form of metacognitive routine into your practice is worth considering. Teachers need space to reflect and reset before tackling the next problem, and many find it helpful to build reflection into several points across their day, week, and year.
The five questions below are a starting point for strengthening your reflection practice.
1. What Can Teachers Reflect on Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly?
When colleagues and opponents on the basketball court told Michael Jordan his defense lagged behind his offense, he set a goal to improve it. He went on to win Defensive Player of the Year, and that same year, NBA Most Valuable Player, a distinction only a handful of players have ever earned together. He didn't stop there, eventually earning nine NBA First Team Defensive selections over his career. His example is a reminder that identifying a specific weakness and working deliberately to address it can pay off, whatever role you're in.
Metacognition happens at some level in everyone. Teachers can use it deliberately, both to understand their students better and to examine the approaches they use with them. There's no shortage of moments in a teaching day where reflection pays off. Here are 10 areas, and more than 100 questions, to guide daily reflection on routines, instruction, and relationships:
- Procedures, Routines, and Transitions
- AM Arrival: How can arrival run more smoothly? Are students coming from the playground, cars, or buses? Which doors do they use? Do students use lockers? What's the first thing students do when they walk into the classroom?
- Supplies: How can students take on more of the supply management themselves? What supplies do they actually need? How can you support them better with what they have?
- Materials: What materials will students need each day? How can students help pass out and collect materials? How do they turn in finished work?
- Lines: What can you say, model, or do to get students from point A to point B safely and efficiently? How often should this routine get practiced? How can students take ownership of lining up on their own?
- PM Dismissal: How can dismissal run more smoothly? Which students ride the bus, go to after-school care, get picked up, or walk home? How can students take more ownership of dismissal for safety and speed?
- Before a Lesson Starts
- Materials and Supplies: Do you have everything ready to go?
- Engagement: How will you hook students right away and keep them engaged throughout? What active-participation techniques and learning structures will you use? What feedback do you want at the beginning, middle, and end of the lesson to confirm mastery?
- Objective and Rationale: What should students know or be able to do by the end of the lesson? How will every student know the objective, and why it matters? What does this content connect to in past learning or in the real world? Does any profession depend on this specific skill?
- Formative Checks: What formative data will you collect to stay on track during the lesson?
- Summative Checks: How will you know, by the end, that students mastered the content?
- Individual Student Checks: Which students need extra attention during this lesson? How will you support them? What's worked for them before? How might you differentiate further?
- Groups of Students Checks: Will students be grouped? How? Flexibly, or the same groups throughout the lesson?
- During the First Part of a Lesson (repeat at the midpoint)
- Effective and Engaging Start: How's the first part of the lesson going so far? Are you meeting the lesson's goals?
- Objective and Rationale: Did students understand the objective? How do you know? Did they understand why it matters? How do you know?
- Formative Checks, Feedback, and Engagement: What feedback are students giving you? Does it tell you to continue, reteach, or shift course for the rest of the lesson? What do formative checks tell you about instruction and engagement so far?
- Relationships: How are students treating each other? How are they responding to you? Do any relationship-building strategies need adjusting, reinforcing, or continuing? How will you communicate that to students?
- At the End of a Lesson
- Lesson Reflection: Have the formative checks, feedback, and engagement level held up? Can you move forward with the planned assessment? Can you predict what the data will show?
- Assessment: Do you need to change, adapt, or keep the planned assessment? Were students engaged enough that the assessment will give you accurate data on both their comprehension and your teaching?
- Relationships: Same questions as the midpoint check.
- Closure: How will you close this lesson? Does it continue later, or lead into the next topic? What closure technique will you use? How will you communicate the lesson's success, or repair the relationship dynamics, before the next one?
- After a Lesson Has Ended
- Relationships: What needs work to improve classroom culture? Which students, groups, or classes need more relationship- or team-building?
- Data: What does the formative and summative data show about mastery? What does it say about your instructional effectiveness? Was there real educational impact? What needs to change?
- Student Relationships with Each Other
- Words: How do students talk to each other? Do you hear signs of a positive culture: kindness, tolerance, empathy?
- Actions: How do students physically treat each other? Do you see support around supplies and materials? Random acts of kindness toward classmates?
- Student Relationships With Teacher
- Words: How do students speak to you? Do you hear respect, trust, kindness, empathy? What specific language do they use when they need support?
- Actions: How do students physically treat you? Do you see visible signs of respect, trust, kindness, and empathy? Do they show unprompted kindness toward you or staff?
- Parent Relationships With Teacher
- Words: How do parents and teachers talk to each other? Do you hear respect, trust, kindness? What specific language do parents use with you?
- Actions: How do parents treat you? Do you see respect, trust, kindness in their actions? Do they offer to volunteer or support the classroom?
- Staff Relationships With Other Teachers
- Words: How do teachers talk to each other? Do you hear respect, trust, kindness, empathy? Is there a shared language among staff?
- Actions: How do teachers treat each other physically and practically? Do you see respect, trust, empathy, and unprompted kindness toward colleagues?
- Teacher Relationships with Administration
- Words: How do administrators talk to teachers? Do you hear respect, trust, empathy? Is there shared language between administrators and teachers?
- Actions: How do administrators treat teachers? Do you see respect, trust, empathy, and unprompted kindness from administrators toward staff?
Reflecting daily and breaking the process into smaller chunks helps you work through these 100 questions more efficiently over time. From there, you can reflect on your entire week or month. The end of a lesson sequence, week, or unit can provide a natural point for broader reflection on where to go next, both academically and socially. Here's a shorter list for wrapping up a week or month:
- Specific lesson reflection (practices, approaches, strategies)
- Pacing of curriculum (behind, on target, ahead)
- Overall classroom culture (all relationships)
- Summative and formative data (reteach, continue, or extend)
- Engagement practices (active participation and learning structures)
- Upcoming curriculum connections (plant seeds, direct connections)
- Upcoming special events or schedule changes
- Proactive reflection (preplanning, getting ahead, prevention)
- Growth mindset reflection (personal and professional learning goals)
The most powerful reflection often comes at the end of the school year. Taking time to review your teaching approach, philosophy, academic data, and social-emotional data helps you decide what to change, adapt, keep, or drop, both for the job and for student outcomes. Here's a short list for that end-of-year review:
- School, state, and district assessment data (summative and normative)
- Discipline referral data, positive and negative trends
- Curriculum, materials, supplies, and technology used and covered
- Instructional strategies: stop, add, or continue
- Formative assessments: stop, add, or continue
- Behavior and relationship strategies: stop, add, or continue
- Proactive and growth-mindset reflection (expanding your personalized learning network)
2. How Can a Teacher Become More Accurate and Specific in Their Reflection?
Reflecting accurately is an abstract skill, shaped heavily by perception. Examining your own self-perception as a teacher can feel uncomfortable, but grounding it in evidence keeps you honest about your abilities. Connecting with professionals inside and outside education helps you build a clearer, more accurate self-perception.
Exemplary teachers are humble but confident. They know they always have room to grow. They know their strengths and weaknesses and keep working to sharpen their skills. Their reflection is sometimes self-critical, but a growth mindset and some perseverance keep most challenges from feeling insurmountable. They look for evidence in their own practice, both to confirm what's working and to pinpoint what needs to change.
Exemplary teachers reflect with specificity. They spend real time on both what went well and what went wrong. When something needs fixing, they look for specific strategies, materials, or people who can help. That specificity lets them approach the same problem differently the next time, and it makes outcomes more predictable because they've planned for them.
As a teacher's toolbox of strategies grows, they can reflect on a workable solution faster and more effectively. Research, experience, and collaboration all sharpen an exemplary teacher's reflection process. The more specific the reflection, the harder the problems it can tackle.
3. How Can Teachers Connect Best Practice, Current Research, Collegial Collaboration, Deep Questioning, and Prior Learning Experiences to Sharpen Reflection?
Teaching talent may come naturally to some, but most of us beg, borrow, and steal ideas, strategies, and materials from other educators. Best practices shift constantly as research evolves. Collaborating with people in and out of education keeps getting easier and faster. Deep questioning from others about your teaching practice can drive real growth, for you and your students. As a teacher gains years of experience, reflection is what lets them connect what worked for past students to the students in front of them now.
Exemplary teachers can point to specific resources, professionals, and colleagues to explain why they teach the way they do. They mix and combine ideas, strategies, and approaches into their own philosophy of education. In strong school districts, educators build shared practices together, drawing on the same resources and professionals. For example, a school using the Daily 5 reading structure might follow Kelly Gallagher and his book Readicide, Steven Layne and Igniting a Passion for Reading, Chris Tovani and I Read It, but I Don't Get It, and Donalyn Miller's The Book Whisperer. Whether it happens at the district, school, grade-level, or individual level, that kind of shared reading philosophy gets built and refined through collaboration and reflection.
Building a personalized learning network (PLN) means surrounding yourself with people who push you to dig deeper into your own ideas and practices. Much like an instructional coach, colleagues and other professionals support you by asking hard, critical questions. That's often where the most accurate self-reflection happens. An exemplary teacher's PLN usually reaches outside the education field entirely, to people who understand concepts relevant to their specific goals. A teacher covering how taxes accrue in a high school accounting class, for instance, might bring a certified public accountant into their PLN. That expertise can outpace anything Google turns up.
Experience can provide useful context for reflection, especially when combined with research, evidence, and collaboration. Exemplary teachers remember specific strategies that worked with individual students and try to replicate those wins with other students who face similar challenges. They reflect on what worked and what didn't, especially when supporting new students with comparable learning needs. Experience also helps them group students with similar needs more effectively.
Citing references, whether people or resources, when adjusting or adding new practices should happen every year. As students change, exemplary teachers know they need to change too.
4. How Do Grit, Perseverance, and a Growth Mindset Shape Effective Reflection?
Grit is one construct researchers have studied in relation to achievement. Researcher Angela Duckworth describes grit as the power of passion and perseverance in her widely watched 2013 TED Talk. Pairing that kind of persistence with a growth mindset can support your teaching practice.
Exemplary teachers use grit to reflect well. When something works, they spend real time figuring out why. They pin down the main factors behind the success, then repeat those same strategies to raise the success rate further. Passion, not just for the subject but for the outcome itself, drives that grit.
Most teachers spend far more time reflecting on what went wrong than on what went right, which is a missed opportunity: replicating success matters just as much. Still, it's worth reflecting on failure, too, on the factors behind it and what you'll do differently next time. Changing your approach is hard, but there's no reason to keep riding a dead horse. A new saddle, more water, or pulling harder won't make it walk. Teachers have to be problem solvers.
Effective teachers persist, adjust instruction, and continue looking for ways to support students. These teachers model that perseverance for their students daily, in both words and actions.
These same teachers carry a strong sense of perseverance in everything they do, not just with students. They're deliberate and empathetic, understanding that their words and actions ripple out to other teachers and to the students sitting in front of them. They think carefully about how they treat students, parents, colleagues, and the wider school community, understanding that strong relationships buy them more time for actual instruction. Effective communication takes perseverance, too.
Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset is essential to exemplary teaching. As Dweck writes on mindsetworks.com, in a growth mindset, people believe their basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work, with brains and talent as only the starting point. That belief builds a love of learning and the resilience needed for real accomplishment.
Exemplary teachers keep looking to grow their knowledge, sharpen their craft, and strengthen relationships. A growth mindset separates them from teachers who believe they already know it all, or already qualify as master teachers. The mindset that matters here is simple: there's always more to learn, and perseverance and grit are how you go get it, for your students and your school.
Say a new student joins your class midyear with support needs you haven't worked with before. Reflective teachers recognize what they don't yet know and go looking for it: reviewing the student's existing plan with the special education team or case manager, talking with the student's previous teachers, and following the school's established procedures for that student rather than improvising a strategy alone. Collaboration with the people who already know the student, and with your own colleagues, is what turns an unfamiliar situation into a workable one.
A teacher who instead reacts punitively without consulting the student's support team, or who blames the student, the parent, or the administration for the placement, misses that same opportunity to learn and adjust.
An exemplary teacher with grit, perseverance, and a growth mindset tackles new problems in search of solutions. They don't shy away from hard challenges, and they understand exactly how reflection drives their own growth and their students'.
5. How Does a Personalized Learning Network (PLN) Support Reflective Practice?
Charlotte Danielson touches on this in Domain 4 Component A, Reflection on Teaching, though with fewer descriptors and examples than in other components. Reflection may be the single most powerful tool a teacher has for improving instruction. The idea of building a personalized learning network (PLN), finding people and resources to support your own growth, isn't new, but it's picked up steam over the past decade. In education specifically, teachers now build PLNs deliberately, and it's making them more connected, more effective, and more reflective.
Picture a PLN as a set of concentric circles, similar to a Venn diagram. The innermost circle holds the colleagues and professionals you collaborate with most, across multiple topics. Further out, you'll find people you talk with often but usually about one or two specific things. At the edges are people you connect with only once or twice. Layer in time as a third dimension: depending on where you are in your career, some of these circles get intense for a while and then fade as your needs shift.
Much like differentiating instruction for students, a PLN gets built around each person's specific needs. Within a school, teachers' PLNs often overlap, especially around a shared school or district focus. Say a sixth-grade team is researching how social media affects student learning and relationships. Their goal is to help sixth graders understand that impact and communicate more positively with each other. As the team finds professionals and colleagues willing to share ideas online, their shared PLN grows.
PLNs are a powerful reflection tool. Social media puts the experience of millions of educators within reach. Exemplary teachers keep up a well-built PLN, both online and in person, that drives their ongoing learning. At any point, they can ask trusted colleagues for advice to grow personally and professionally.
(Charlotte Danielson Model: Domain 4, Component A)
MORE ROCK MY EVALUATION RELATED READINGS:
- Reflecting on Teaching (currently here)
- Maintaining Accurate Records
- Communicating with Families
- Improve Participation in the Professional Community
- Growing and Developing Professionally
- Showing Professionalism
Two Kinds of Reflecting on Teaching, and How to Actually Practice Them
Researcher Donald Schön drew a useful distinction between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Reflection-in-action happens in the moment: you notice students tuning out mid-lesson and adjust on the spot, maybe switching a question-and-answer drill to something more active. Reflection-on-action happens afterward, when you look back at the whole lesson with some distance. Most of the questions above fall into that second category, but strong teachers do both.
None of this works without a format that fits your schedule. A short written journal at the end of the day can help surface patterns that memory alone misses. Where permitted by school or district policy and applicable student-privacy requirements, recording and reviewing a lesson can offer another perspective on instruction, particularly on tone and pacing. Talking through a lesson with a colleague or instructional coach adds a perspective you can't generate alone. These approaches can be adapted to the time available, and consistency matters more than any particular format. If you want a more structured starting point, a set of proactive reflection questions can help you build the habit before problems show up rather than after.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is reflective teaching?
Reflective teaching is the practice of deliberately reviewing your lessons, your relationships with students and colleagues, and your own growth, then using what you find to adjust your practice going forward. It ranges from in-the-moment adjustments during a lesson to deeper review at the end of a week, month, or year.
How often should teachers reflect on their teaching?
Daily reflection catches the small things: a routine that's not working, a student who needs more support. Weekly or monthly reflection is better suited to pacing and unit-level decisions. End-of-year reflection is where the biggest shifts in philosophy and practice usually happen, since it's the only point where a full year of data is available at once.
What's the difference between reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action?
Reflection-in-action happens during the lesson itself, as you notice something and adjust on the spot. Reflection-on-action happens afterward, when you look back with some distance. Both matter, and most teachers lean more heavily on one than the other without realizing it.
What are some simple ways to build a reflection habit?
A short daily journal entry, a recorded lesson reviewed for ten minutes, or a regular conversation with a colleague or coach all work. The specific format matters less than doing it consistently enough that it becomes routine rather than an extra task.
Why do teachers skip reflection even though it helps?
It's usually the first thing cut when a schedule gets busy, since it doesn't feel as urgent as grading or lesson planning. The tradeoff is that skipped reflection tends to mean repeating avoidable mistakes, which costs more time later than the reflection would have taken.
- Reflection works best as a routine, not a rescue - build it into daily, weekly, and yearly checkpoints instead of reaching for it only after something goes wrong.
- Specificity is what separates strong reflection from vague reflection - naming the exact strategy, student, or moment that worked (or didn't) is what makes the next attempt better.
- Reflection happens in two modes - in the moment, during a lesson, and afterward, with some distance. Strong teachers use both.
- A personalized learning network extends what one teacher can reflect on alone - colleagues, coaches, and even professionals outside education sharpen the questions you ask yourself.
- The format matters less than the consistency - a two-minute journal entry done daily beats an hour-long reflection done twice a year.
Reflection isn't only about improving in your current classroom. Teachers who build this habit often use it to think through whether their current role, grade level, or school is still the right fit, and some use that clarity to look at open teaching positions elsewhere.
Reflection is one piece of a bigger picture: teachers who build this habit early often find themselves drawn toward instructional coaching, mentorship, or leadership roles down the line. If that's a direction you're curious about, it usually starts with formal coursework in curriculum or instructional leadership.
As a 5th grade teacher, in 2010 Jon won the Presidential Award for Elementary Math and Science Teaching (PAEMST). As a principal, his school won the 2012 Blue Ribbon Award. In 2018, he won the National Distinguished Principal Award (NDP). In 2019 he won the National No Kid Hungry Breakfast Hero Award.
Jon is the author of three guides published on teacher.org: An Educator's Guide to Combat Bullying & Bully Prevention; Teacher Evaluation: A Transition Guide to Exemplary Performance; and You are the Wild Card: Infusing Fun Back into Curriculum. He has authored a children's picture book that was released January 2019 titled Benjamin’s Visit to Principal Reads Office…again! (available at www.archwaypublishing.com)
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