Three Small, Impactful Ways To Weave Reflection Into Your Classroom

Plus: a preview of a new Fall Book Study everyone is welcome to join!

I sometimes wonder if we could officially designate October as “One-Day-At-A-Time” month.

For many of us, those far-reaching, ambitious visions of summer have been overwhelmed by the exhausting minutiae of the daily classroom grind; the honeymoon glow of the first several weeks has ebbed almost entirely; and inevitably the wave of distractions is looming (or already here).

One day at a time, indeed.

The other day I was discussing with a colleague what they were looking for as a teacher right now, and they were very honest about their capacity and focus:

“I want something I can use tomorrow.”

In the spirit of that conversation and more broadly the spirit of October, I wanted to share a follow-up post from my initial goals of the year around one of my focuses: leaning into even more student reflection in the classroom.

This week’s post has a simple goal: to share three ways that I’ve tried to weave metacognitive thinking and reflection into my classroom this school year.

1. End-of-Task Confidence Scales

2. Strength/Growth Area Debriefs

3. Match-the-Feedback Activities

---

❶ End-of-Task Confidence Scales

If you’re looking for an easy-to-implement tool for metacognitive reflection in any task or assignment, I’d point to this one first: simply ask students to identify and explain their level of confidence following the task they have completed.

That’s it. Seriously: it’s that simple.

And it’s also that impactful for both students and you as a teacher.

For students, this asks them to consider what they just did and name how they see their own learning and skill mastery. This makes the learning experience “stickier,” in my experience, and also adds a level of accountability for learners in your classroom community.

For you as a teacher? You get two measures to compare: a student’s performance versus their perceived level of mastery. If it skews too far in either direction (example: a student expressing low levels of confidence despite near-mastery of a skill) it makes for an important conversation—and stepping back you can quickly get a snapshot of overall levels of confidence across a classroom.

• Tip to make it more accessible? Try doing this in low-stakes ways first and norming “confidence levels” with non-assessment tasks—and also model potential answers at the lower and higher end of the scale whole-class, too, before asking students to do it.

---

❷ Strength/Growth Area Debriefs

Whereas the end-of-task confidence scale reflection is more of a window for you into how students feel about their learning, a related version of this is to have students reflect following a task on a) what they felt they did well on and b) a potential growth area, question, or concern.

Particularly once you have built a culture around collaboration, this can be a “next step” to aspire towards in terms of not just having students reflect in writing but also sharing aloud these reflections with classmates in small groups. (I especially like this if the task was more independent and digital, as it helps balance out the dynamic of the classroom—a priority I was able to share in a conversation with Andrew Boryga of Edutopia recently.)

• Tip to make it more accessible? Offer a list of different potential strengths and growth areas and have students choose from them before explaining—which also makes for a bit more of an “enclosed” set of choices that likely will improve the potential discussions to be had with classmates.

---

❸ Match-the-Feedback Activities

One final strategy I’ve leaned on for reflection, particularly after students have completed a writing task, is to compile a variety of my individual notes of feedback into a single document—and then let them do the “teacher work” of matching each note to anonymous samples that I’ve selected.

In the case of the image above, students had a chance to work in small groups navigating twelve different pieces of feedback—both strengths and growth areas, which is important!—and then assigning them to three different student paragraphs before I explained what actual feedback each one deserved to receive.

The follow-up? Students then re-read their own paragraph and decided which feedback belonged with theirs. In this way, rather than passively receiving feedback students were able to have agency and investment in that process, leading to a more-lasting experience because of the reflection woven into it.

• Tip to make it more accessible? Narrow the feedback to a specific skill or focus (example: use of textual evidence), as when you start providing too many options or broadening the focus across different skillsets, it makes the activity less-accessible for students who may need it the most.

---

🚨 Book Study Announcement

Speaking of reflection, one of my own over the past year has been just how much I’ve enjoyed being a part of

Simon Haisell

’s slow-read of War and Peace, a year-long journey that has offered a daily space to read and reflect and, most importantly, converse—in this way offering a community of shared experience along the reading journey.

So I figured it was time for us to try and do something like that with The Broken Copier.

On October 13th,

Adrian Neibauer

and I will launch a project we are incredibly excited about: a one-chapter-a-week reading of

Alex Shevrin Venet

’s Becoming an Everyday Changemaker. We will take turns sending out posts via our respective Substacks at 9am each Sunday morning across the project, with educators from all over beginning conversation in the comments based on their own reaction to that week’s reading.

It’s not too late, either, to get your own copy of the book—and of course to join in whenever you’re willing to discuss a book that feels incredibly resonant in this current moment of education.

Here’s the calendar for those interested:

---

One Final 🪨🗞✄ Note

I know I posted about this on Twitter the other day, but I did want to share here too that a major moment happened in my teaching career recently:

I won our mid-class classroom rock-paper-scissors tournament.

For the first time in 13 years.

After over a decade of loss-after-loss-after-loss (probably 40-50 losses a year, which boggles the mind in terms of the odds of me losing for 13 years straight) the moment finally happened—and I got a round of applause from the entire room.

Deservedly.

So if nothing else, Year 13 for me was the year the losing streak came to an end, finally, and I am definitely going to hold onto that for quite some time.

(At minimum, that should get me through October. Right?)