When You Ask Students To Reflect on Their Reflections

3 different opportunities for reflection I neglected earlier in my career

There is an underlying assumption in the literature that students who are better at self-reflection, perform better academically. To date, there is no finding to refute or support this assumption. Such a finding may suggest that curricular interventions to teach self-reflection are futile, and should be abandoned. [1]

—Lew and Schmidt (2011)

Take even a brief perusal of the research around how reflection can impact student learning, and at minimum you walk away with a proverbial shoulder shrug.

While some studies do posit clear value around its impact [2], others are much more tentative.

Kinda-sorta maybe? We think? We hope?

Rather than backing away from a focus on reflection in the classroom, though, or even treading water with my current systems, this school year I decided to double-down and center student reflection even more emphatically.

An example of this centering? This year, in our course vision document that I share with students and families alongside our syllabus, for the first time I explicitly named the skill of reflection as one of our seven goals for every student by the end of the course:

I believe many teachers incorporate aspects of reflection in some way or another in their classroom, at least occasionally, and I also believe almost all teachers recognize the value that reflection can offer. (No matter the admittedly mixed research)

However, there are three missed opportunities with reflection that I’ve recognized in my own practices over the years—as without these elements, I’ve experienced a type of ceiling as far as what reflection can become:

1. Helping students collect and organize their reflections

2. Unpacking and discussing reflection as a skill, not just a practice

3. Leaning on reflection to build trust and confidence

Today’s post lays out the “why” behind each of these opportunities—including student examples from this year that I believe showcase just how valuable reflection can become when it is centered in the classroom.

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⓵ When You Help Students Collect and Organize Their Reflections

As much as individual activities with built-in reflection offer value in their own right, the “next step” that I think is worth considering is how you as a teacher can help students intentionally collect those reflections over a school year.

In our classroom, the “glue” for this is 100% the “Writing Story” document that students use to reflect on their process and feedback each time they complete a major writing task. (Full sample of one student’s here)

Particularly given the number of things going on in each student’s life—numerous other classes, extracurriculars, work, etc.—in recent years this document has become essential in our classroom as the one place a student can access all their work (they hyperlink each writing task onto the document) and, even more importantly, consider their own learning and perception of their own learning over time.

This is hands-down my favorite thing about this document: it creates an opportunity for students to return to previous reflections and look for both patterns and shifts in how they talk about their own learning.

Indeed, in our final activity of the semester, students employ Marisa Thompson’s TQE annotation strategy to their own reflections—leading to instances like this (also pictured above):

1. After looking over their previous reflections earlier in the semester, this student highlighted the phrase “I was absolutely right about my confidence”

2. They then added an epiphany to it as a comment: In most of my previous reflections, I had written that the results were better than I thought. The fact that I started this by saying that I was right to be confident is a wonderful sign of growth!

If you wondered where my obsession with centering reflection comes from, it’s moments like these in which (A) a student on their own notices a trend in how they saw themselves as a learner and (B) names with pride their own step forward in terms of self-confidence.

I mean, how cool is that?

This is why that “next step” of creating a system to allow students to collect and organize their individual reflections matters so much—it offers them agency to see their own self-perception over time and, as a result, to authentically consider their evolving identity as a learner.

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⓶ When You Unpack and Discuss Reflection as a Skill, Not Just a Practice

Motivated in part by my conversations with Sara Candela last Spring, one of my goals going into this school year was to take one further step: centering reflection as a skill in the classroom.

For me, this meant doing some work over the summer to come up with a student-facing rubric that they could use to examine their own reflections, which is how I ended up with this document—a document students filled out this past week as we closed the semester.

The goal of this reflection-as-a-skill document? To deconstruct the abstract notion of “reflection” and consider it in four dimensions: [1] contextual awareness; [2] reflection quality; [3] emotional awareness; and [4] reflection as a path to action.

In our classroom, this meant the following steps in a recent lesson:

• I would name and explain one quadrant of the rubric at a time, talking through my perspective on it and having students a) check off the boxes they felt they were doing and b) give themselves a “score” of where they were at.

• Students would then share their answers with shoulder partners and small groups for each quadrant—elevating this from an independent activity to a classroom conversation.

• Finally, students completed the two reflection boxes at the bottom, including their goal for the second half of the year—which they’ll return to in June to consider and discuss the progress they made. (Some different student answers here.)

I fully admit: this is my first year trying this out, and I very much expect to keep learning and adapting through experience and further research—but the early results in the classroom make me more motivated than ever to keep leaning into the idea of reflection not just as a habit or practice but rather as a skill.

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⓷ When You Lean on Reflection To Build Trust and Confidence.

As enthusiastic as I am about this pedagogical shift towards reflection in recent years in terms of its ability to develop student skills and capacity, this past week I was also reminded of the underlying value it offers in establishing a foundation for trust and confidence in the classroom.

This also reflects the Lew and Schmidt’s conclusion in their analysis of the impact of self-reflection: “the literature reveals that self-reflection does improve learning in other ways […] although it cannot be measured using academic achievement.”

When we broaden the way we look at our classrooms beyond a strict—and, I’d argue, limited—focus on academic achievement, the opportunity that lies in reflective practices becomes even more clear to me. Reflection can take many forms, too, including those that may not seem to be directly aligned with academic achievement at the surface level.

But in some ways that makes them even more valuable.

By incorporating quick and informal checks such as Jim Mayers’s exit ticket system and then by taking the time to read and respond to the results with transparency and humility, reflection has become a two-way vehicle for communication in our classroom and, as a result, increased levels of trust and rapport.

In asking students in an end-of-semester survey what was the one thing they’d prioritize to keep doing in the second half of the year, these were two different responses I came across:

• Keep doing consistent reflections, they've been a great motivator for me to keep putting the effort in even when I'm struggling with the content. Our reflections are also a great way for me to see what I'm improving on and the things that still need work and improvement.

• These check-ins are great and I think you should keep doing them. They really help me feel like my voice is being heard, like someone cares, and like my feelings matter even if its something small.

There is value in the act of individual reflection on the part of students, yes, yet again and again I get to see firsthand the real power that comes when that reflection is communicated to others—in partner conversations, group discussions, or even my own reading and returning of feedback to the classroom.

In this way, reflection is not just about what we do in the classroom but rather how—and to transform the how of the classroom towards a more-reflective lens?

Above all, that is what I’m most excited about and grateful for.

And looking forward to doing even more going forward.

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Additional Notes

• Speaking of reflection, I was recently able to share some of my classroom practices for Edutopia in a post titled “3 Student Self-Reflection Strategies After They Finish an Assignment”—feel free to check it out!

• One of my favorite analogies this week regarding teaching? The idea of the teacher as the choreographer in the classroom, via Adrian Neibauer: “Once students know the basic steps of my classroom, I get to choreograph learning experiences that meet my students where they are and push them to grow socially and academically.”

• For those who are not already burnt out from reading and learning about the impact of artificial intelligence in education, this week I read my favorite piece of 2025 on the topic by Jason Gulya: "Can you really build a life when you don’t know what is real and what is fake?" Gulya gives much more weight than most to the student perspective in this piece, especially the emotional lens of this world that is unraveling (raveling?) before us when it comes to technology.

• Finally, if you’re looking to lean into community, the always-incredible Chanea Bond is joining me in a slow-read journey through Toni Morrison’s Beloved this month over on BlueSky. You’re invited to read a chapter a day along with us, sharing and posting your reactions as you go with the belief that reading in community can offer its own power (especially in this moment).

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References

1. Lew, M. D., & Schmidt, H. G. (2011). Self-reflection and academic performance: is there a relationship?. Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice, 16(4), 529–545. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-011-9298-z

2. Evans, Laurynn H. (2016, Winter). The Case for Reflective Assessment. Independent School, https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/winter-2016/the-case-for-reflective-assessment/