Developing a Reflective Teaching Practice

What Is Reflective Teaching?

Reflective teaching is the habit of deliberately examining your own practice — what you do in the classroom, why you do it, how students respond, and what you might do differently. It is the difference between teaching the same course twenty times and teaching it once, learning deeply, and improving it nineteen more.

The concept draws on the work of educator and philosopher Donald Schön, who described two modes of professional reflection: reflection-in-action (adjusting in real time, mid-class, as you read the room) and reflection-on-action (stepping back after the fact to analyze what happened and why). A strong reflective practice uses both.

Reflective teaching is not self-criticism. It is not a performance review or a checklist of deficiencies. It is a disciplined, honest, and ultimately optimistic habit — rooted in the belief that teaching can always be understood more deeply and done more effectively. The best teachers are not those who were born gifted in the classroom; they are those who paid close attention over time and kept getting better.

Why It Matters

Teaching is complex, contextual, and often invisible. Without deliberate reflection, instructors tend to default to how they were taught, repeat what feels familiar, and miss patterns in student struggle that accumulate across a semester. Reflective practice interrupts that autopilot.

Research on expert teaching consistently finds that reflective habits distinguish highly effective instructors from merely competent ones. Reflective teachers:

Identify and address their own blind spots more quickly
Respond to student needs rather than delivering content in a vacuum
Develop a richer vocabulary for talking about their teaching with colleagues
Build courses that genuinely improve from year to year rather than stagnating
Experience more satisfaction and less burnout, because they approach their work as something they are actively shaping rather than simply performing

Reflection also makes you a more credible teacher. When you genuinely study your own practice, you model intellectual honesty — the same disposition you are trying to cultivate in your students.

The Foundations: Building Reflection Into Your Routine

Reflective practice doesn't require hours of journaling or elaborate self-assessment systems. What it requires is intention and consistency. A few small habits, maintained regularly, produce significant insight over time.

Keep a Teaching Journal

A teaching journal doesn't need to be polished or comprehensive. After class — or at the end of a teaching day — spend five minutes writing answers to a small set of questions:

What went well today, and why do I think it worked?
What didn't land the way I expected? What might explain that?
What did I notice about student engagement or confusion?
What would I do differently if I taught this session again?

The discipline is in the regularity, not the length. Even brief, honest entries accumulate into a rich record. Over time, you will begin to see patterns — the same concepts that reliably confuse students, the moments that consistently energize the room, the activities that fall flat every time.

Observe and Be Observed

Watching another faculty member teach — in your discipline or outside it — is one of the fastest ways to expand your repertoire and sharpen your own self-awareness. You will notice choices you never thought to make, see techniques you want to try, and return to your own classroom with fresh eyes.

Being observed is equally valuable, though it requires trust. Ask a trusted colleague to sit in on a class and offer feedback using a simple framework: What did they notice? What questions did it raise? What did they see in student responses that you might have missed? Classroom observation is not evaluation — frame it explicitly as a collaborative learning opportunity.

Gather Student Feedback — More Than Once

End-of-quarter evaluations arrive too late to help the students who filled them out. Build in earlier feedback loops:

At the three- or four-week mark, ask students a few open questions: What's helping your learning? What's getting in the way? What's one thing you'd change?
Use anonymous surveys via Canvas or Google Forms. Consider using the Mid-Quarter Feedback Survey found in the Instructor Resources of your Canvas course site.
After a significant assignment or exam, ask briefly: What prepared you well for this? What do you wish you'd known going in?

The goal is not to make students happy — it's to gather usable information while you can still act on it. When you receive feedback, close the loop: tell students what you heard and what, if anything, you're adjusting. This models responsiveness and builds trust.

Revisit and Revise Your Course Materials

Each time you use a reading, assignment, or activity that doesn't work as intended, note it and adjust it before the next iteration. Keep a running "revision list" alongside your teaching journal — a simple document where you capture changes you want to make to the course before you forget them. Small, consistent revisions compound into meaningfully better courses over time.

At the Beginning of the Term: Setting Yourself Up for Reflection

The start of a new term is not only about preparing content — it is also an opportunity to set intentions and create the conditions for learning for the quarter ahead.

Review What You Learned Last Time

Before diving into syllabus revisions or content prep, read back through your teaching journal and student feedback from the previous iteration of the course. Ask yourself:

What did students consistently struggle with, and how have I addressed it?
What activities or assignments produced the best learning, and have I preserved them?
What did I intend to change last time but didn't follow through on?
Is there anything in my approach I've been assuming works but have never really tested?

If this is a new course, do this exercise with a colleague who has taught something similar, or with the literature on teaching in your discipline.

Set One or Two Teaching Goals for the Quarter

Rather than vague intentions to "do better," identify one or two specific, observable goals for your teaching this term. Examples:

I want to ask better discussion questions — ones that generate genuine divergence of opinion rather than fishing for the right answer.
I want to reduce the amount of time I spend lecturing in the first 20 minutes and see what happens.
I want every student to receive meaningful written feedback at least once before the midpoint of the term.

Specific goals give your reflection focus. They make it easier to notice relevant evidence across the semester and to evaluate whether you made progress.

Design Feedback Mechanisms in Advance

Don't wait until Week 7 to wonder how things are going. Plan now when and how you will gather information:

Schedule a mid-term student survey for a specific date.
Identify a colleague you might invite to observe a class.
Block time on your calendar at the midpoint and end of term for sustained reflection.

Building these into your calendar before the term begins makes them far more likely to happen.

Write a "Teaching Letter to Yourself"

At the start of term, write a brief letter describing your intentions, hopes, and concerns for the term. Seal it (figuratively, in a folder or document) and revisit it at the end of term. This practice captures your starting mindset in a way that is easy to forget by December or June, and creates a meaningful point of comparison when you reflect at the close.

At the End of the Term: Making Sense of What Happened

The end of a semester is hectic — grading, student questions, administrative deadlines. It is also the most important moment to stop and take stock before everything fades. Make end-of-term reflection a protected ritual, not an afterthought.

Conduct a Personal Course Debrief

Set aside an hour — ideally within one to two weeks of the term ending, while memory is fresh — and work through a structured self-debrief. Some useful prompts:

On learning outcomes:

Did students achieve the learning goals I set? What evidence do I have?
Where did student performance fall short of my expectations? What might explain the gap — my teaching, the assessment design, the material itself, or factors outside my control?

On course design:

Which assignments produced the most learning? Which produced the most confusion or frustration with no clear payoff?
Was the workload appropriate and equitably distributed across the term?
Did the sequence of topics and skills make sense? Were there places where students clearly lacked prerequisite knowledge?

On classroom dynamics:

Which sessions felt most alive and engaged? What conditions made that possible?
Were there groups of students who seemed to disengage — students from particular backgrounds, students in specific seats, quiet students who I lost track of?
Did I create a classroom environment where students felt safe to ask questions and take intellectual risks?

On yourself as a teacher:

What did I do this quarter that I'm genuinely proud of?
What habit or approach am I ready to leave behind?
What's one thing I want to try differently next time?

Read Student Evaluations Thoughtfully — Not Defensively

End-of-quarter evaluations are imperfect instruments: they are influenced by grades, likability, and factors unrelated to learning. They should be read critically, not taken as verdicts. That said, they contain real signal.

Look for patterns across multiple students rather than fixating on outliers. A single harsh comment tells you about one student's experience; five students raising the same issue tells you something worth examining. Separate feedback about your teaching (pacing, clarity, availability, feedback quality) from feedback about course policies or difficulty, which often reflects student preferences rather than learning effectiveness. And pay particular attention to comments from students who struggled — they often reveal barriers that high-performing students navigate around invisibly.

Update Your Revision List

Return to the running list of changes you captured during the term and decide which to act on. Categorize them:

Act on before next time — clear, manageable improvements
Explore further — ideas that need more thought, conversation with a colleague, or a trial run
Set aside for now — changes that turned out to be less important than they seemed in the moment

Then, while the quarter is still fresh, make the easy revisions to your syllabus, assignment sheets, and course calendar. Future you will be grateful.

Share and Discuss With a Colleague

Reflection done entirely alone has limits. Find a colleague — in your department or outside it — and have a 30-minute conversation about how your respective semesters went. What did each of you try? What surprised you? What are you each still puzzling over?

These conversations are among the most professionally nourishing interactions available to faculty, and they are chronically underutilized. You don't need a formal structure — just a colleague you trust and a willingness to be honest.

Revisit Your Letter to Yourself

Pull out the letter you wrote at the beginning of the term and read it. Did the quarter unfold the way you anticipated? Did you follow through on your intentions? What does the gap between your hopes at the start and your experience at the end tell you?

This practice often surfaces insights that a straightforward debrief misses — reminding you of concerns you had forgotten, or revealing growth you didn't notice accumulating.

Building a Long-Term Practice

A single quarter of reflection is useful. A career of it is transformative. Over time, reflective teachers develop:

A clearer personal philosophy of teaching — an articulated sense of what they believe about learning and why
A growing repertoire of techniques and approaches drawn from experience, observation, and reading
The ability to diagnose classroom problems quickly and accurately
A track record of meaningful course evolution that is visible in their syllabi and materials over time

Consider keeping your teaching journals and end-of-term debriefs across years. Reading your reflections from five years ago — seeing what you were struggling with, what you've resolved, what new questions have opened up — is one of the most clarifying experiences a teacher can have.

Reflective teaching is, ultimately, a form of intellectual honesty applied to your own practice. It asks the same thing of you that good teaching asks of your students: stay curious, tolerate uncertainty, and keep learning.