While teacher observation is heavily utilized in classrooms worldwide, it is not the only method to improve teacher effectiveness. Teacher self-reflection is an alternate approach that can help educators deepen their understanding of their teaching style and enhance their instruction and classroom management.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, self-reflection is "the activity of thinking about your own feelings and behavior and the reasons that may lie behind them."
In the classroom, self-reflection allows teachers to recognize recurring patterns in their teaching, focus on what is most effective, avoid complacency, act more intentionally, and identify areas for improvement.
Why do Traditional Observations Fail to Accurately Measure Teacher Effectiveness?
Traditional teacher observations often yield findings that may not accurately reflect a teacher's practice. There are a couple of primary reasons for this.
1) Observations Create Stress for Teachers
Teachers experience high levels of stress during observations, which can lead to uncharacteristic behavior and inaccurate assessments. When significant staffing decisions, such as reemployment or promotions, rest on evaluations, teachers endure even more stress during the observation process.
2) Observations Are Too Inflexible
As Susan Stodolsky states in her article Teacher Evaluation: The Limits of Looking, teacher evaluations rest on the assumption that effective teaching practices are known and recognizable.
Many school districts assume that, given the high regulatory requirements for teacher observations, evaluators will be able to identify effective classroom practices and provide a fair examination. However, administrators evaluate based on specific criteria that prompt them to observe whether teachers demonstrate the chosen actions and provide a summary score for each teacher's class. This evaluation process encourages standardized teaching practices and fails to acknowledge systematic variation that boosts classroom engagement (Stodolsky, 1984).
Therefore, it is wrong to assume that small actions observed during an evaluation period accurately reflect a teacher's capabilities.
How Does Self-Reflection Improve Teaching Effectiveness Compared to Traditional Observation?
Traditional classroom observations miss the internal decision-making, intentions, and contextual factors that shape daily teaching practice. Self-reflection, by contrast, places educators at the center of their own professional growth. It encourages ongoing, honest analysis of what’s working, what isn’t, and why, making improvement a continuous process rather than an occasional event.
1) Teacher Self-Reflection Avoids Complacency
Reflective teaching fosters a mindset of continuous growth that prevents teachers from becoming complacent in their teaching methods. Hibajene Shandomo explains that if teachers have ten years of experience but simply repeat the same techniques year after year, they only have one year of experience repeated ten times (Shandomo, n.d.). Reflecting on your teaching methods is critical to improve classroom effectiveness, drive professional growth, and avoid stagnation.
2) Teacher Self-Reflection Encourages Ownership
Unlike traditional observation models, which can feel evaluative or top-down, self-reflection gives teachers ownership over their practice. Educators set their own goals, track their progress, and adjust their approaches based on real classroom experiences. This sense of autonomy fosters trust in the process and reduces defensiveness, making teachers more open to change and more invested in long-term improvement.
3) Teacher Self-Reflection Improves Student Outcomes
When teachers engage in meaningful self-reflection, the benefits extend directly to students. Traditional observation evaluates only a limited set of actions and fails to account for the teaching variations that support individual students’ unique needs. Self-reflection enables teachers to assess how their instructional methods affect each student, enabling them to effectively address learning gaps. This approach leads to stronger student-teacher relationships and improved academic outcomes.
How to Implement Effective Teacher Self-Reflection
Once an educator has had the opportunity to reflect on their teaching and identify recurring behaviors in the classroom, they can identify areas they want to improve. Often, reflecting on improvement can be a daunting task as many individuals strive to improve in too many places and struggle to stay on track with their original goals. Since many individuals lack specificity in goal setting, one way to combat this tendency is to identify strengths and weaknesses. Educators should set a few goals to help them grow in areas of weakness and develop specific measurements to track improvement towards these goals.
- Content: What was taught? How did students show mastery of what they learned?
- Approach: What actions am I currently implementing in my classroom and why? How do these practices impact individual students?
- Relationships: How can I encourage more engagement with my students?
Act Deliberately Instead of Reactively
Interactions with students and other unexpected factors can result in reactive responses rather than intentional action. While some spontaneous response is inevitable in the classroom, striving to act with intent throughout your lessons is essential. As you evaluate each day, make note of situations where you had to rely on reactive behaviors. Identify ways you could modify your reactions moving forward. Therefore, if a similar situation occurs in the future, you will have a plan and can act more effectively.
Set Achievable Goals
Once you’ve reflected on your teaching and identified recurring behaviors in the classroom, you can pinpoint areas you want to improve. Often, reflecting can be a daunting task as many individuals strive to improve in too many places and struggle to stay on track with their original goals.
To make goal setting more approachable, start by identifying your strengths and weaknesses. Start small. Set one goal for each area of weakness to help you grow, and develop specific measurements to track improvement toward these goals.
Use Self-Reflection Tools
- Journal reflections can help you recall specific events and document significant actions from that day. After a lesson or day of teaching, taking five minutes to reflect on what went well, what could have gone better, and one thing to focus on improving tomorrow takes minimal effort but will reap substantial rewards. Additionally, the physical act of reflective journaling can help you set clear parameters around your reflection time before moving on to your next task.
- Video-based reflection allows you to observe your teaching both from a teacher's and students' perspective. As a teacher, you have to balance educating students across various subjects, addressing varying skill levels, and developing your teaching interests to create engaging lesson plans. Due to these factors, video can enable you to see aspects you might miss. Furthermore, video reflection allows you to evaluate unconscious actions to correct these behaviors. Video is the only way to evaluate all factors of your teaching practice in an unaltered and unbiased manner.
About Vosaic: Video Feedback for Teacher Self-Reflection, Powered by AI
Vosaic's secure cloud-based video platform helps teachers, pre-service teachers, and administrators bridge the gap between theory and practice. Easy-to-use video recording, commenting, and sharing enable users to observe, coach, and self-reflect more effectively.
