If you’re anything like me, you’re constantly asking your students to reflect on what they’re doing, both in the moment, from class to class, and after a culminating performance. But sometimes we can get so caught up asking our students to reflect that we forget to reflect ourselves (or even better, keep saying we’ll get to it later!) Here are some of my tips on reflecting at the end of a unit to help improve your practice. (and stick around until the end for a freebie to help you do it!)
1 – Start before the unit even starts by setting goals
Again, goal setting is something I stress with my students but can lose sight of myself. If you go into the unit with a clear goal or goals, it not only makes it easier to reflect on at the end of the unit, but it makes the unit easier to plan as well. Think beyond the obvious for your goals, as well! Obviously, students learning to play the recorder better will be a goal of your recorder unit. But do you also want them to become better sheet music readers? Maybe become better ensemble players? Maybe increase their confidence playing alone and in small groups? Think about this before the unit starts to make a lot of things a lot easier!
2 – Start with the large scale
I always start my reflection with thinking about the unit as a whole. This usually starts as a bit of a brain dump about the facts of the unit (dates, number of classes, what resources I used). Then I try to answer some questions: How do I feel the unit went? What were some of the things that went well? What went poorly? Was the length appropriate, or do you wish you would’ve gone a class longer or ended a class earlier? Did you meet the goals that you set at the beginning of the unit?
More important than even asking yourself these questions is WRITING THE ANSWERS DOWN! Writing it down both makes you put more thought into your answers, and lets you build off them when it comes time to improve the unit for next year. You can also start to add in more of the specifics around the broader points you’ve written down.
3 – Find the WHY
Once you have your broad strokes written down, start to dig in to some of the “why”s, especially about things that went poorly. For example, when I finished teaching recorders recently, my biggest complaint about the unit is that the sheet music management was all over the place. I was plagued by kids not having their music, telling me that someone had “stolen” their booklet, and a multitude of other excuses for why they needed their 75th copy of the recorder booklet. I need to ask myself WHY that all occurred. Did I not lay out and enforce clear enough instructions about how sheet music should be managed at the beginning of the unit? (Probably!) Did I not give them enough space to store their booklets at the end of every class, creating traffic jams? (Also probably!) Do I need to expect some booklet management problems when teaching big groups in a big room like I do at my current job? (Yup!) Looking into these whys leads me right into the next point…
4 – Make a plan for next time!
One of the reasons reflection is so important in every aspect of life is to make plans for moving forward – so what’s your plan for the next time you teach this unit? This is when you take a look at those whys and use them to solve the problems you had with the unit, if they can be solved. You probably won’t come up with a solution to every problem, and that’s okay! For my booklet problem, I think part of the solution is that I just have to face that the groups are bigger at my current job than groups I have taught in the past, so a little bit more disorganization is to be expected. Because of that, I need to be even more stringent than I’m used to about instructions for booklets at the beginning of the unit.
Make a list of plans for next time you teach this unit, and then proceed to…
5 – Make a plan for your plan
This isn’t as much as “step 5” as a “do concurrently with step 4”, but you need to make a plan for your plan. I’m sure we all think of all the great things we would improve about our teaching, and then those things fall away like crumbs off a cookie, swept under the couch to be revealed again who knows when.
Take the list of actions you need to do to improve your unit you made in step 4 and choose when you are going to do them.
You may not have time to do them all. The plan for some of them might be to not do them at all. THAT IS OKAY!
For me, I usually split them into two categories – do before September (so either during this school year or during the summer before next), and do right before the unit comes up again. I pick 2 colour highlighters and I highlight each of them with their corresponding colour. For example, I might plan what worksheets to use in my recorder centers before September (so I have time to make/buy them if necessary), but I don’t need to print and file them into their folders until a week or two before I need them.
Oh, and bonus STEP 6 – make sure you put all these notes somewhere where you’ll actually be able to find them when you come to this unit again next year!
I used to just scribble all my reflections into a Google Doc during recess, but then I decided I deserve something better and you do too! Check out my FREE Teacher Unit Reflection worksheets over on my TpT Store!
And if you’re looking for something for your students to reflect, check out my performance reflection worksheet pack over on TPT:
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