Excel-lent reflections

In your early teaching years, you will have been asked to reflect on your lessons: what went well, what didn’t go so well, why? Although you will have had lots of feedback from other teachers, this self-reflection process is vital in developing your own skills, particularly once you don’t have someone there give you feedback.

Reflecting on your own teaching is something that will happen before, during and after your lessons. These thoughts are useful, but it’s often hard to remember them when you return to teaching that class next time or that lesson again next year. I’m sure that, at some point, you’ve had a collection of scraps of paper, or the digital equivalent, with comments you have jotted down to capture your thinking.

Often, though, I find it difficult to ensure that I write these things down when I’m rushing off to the next thing. Keeping track of all those pieces of paper can be impossible. So, I started to wonder if there was a better way to build this reflection into my practice.

This is where I turned to spreadsheets. They are great because they allow you to keep everything in one place, to make sure that you have somewhere ready to jot down your notes and to look for patterns and trends in your classes, or in your own reflections.

I built my spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, but you can use any spreadsheet software you like.

There are many ways you could set your spreadsheet up, depending on what you want to get out of it. One example is to put the week in the first column, the day of the week in the next, then each class you have in that week in column three. Then, add columns for ‘What went well?’ and ‘Why?’. Follow this with columns for ‘What might I change?’ and again ‘Why?’.

I would encourage you to try a few different headings to decide what works best for you. Do keep the ‘Why?’ columns though, as asking why gets you to think more deeply about the reasons behind your successes and the things that don’t quite work out.

Putting each lesson for the upcoming week on the spreadsheet on Monday morning and filling it in before you finish on Friday ensures that you’re capturing your reflections while they’re still fresh. I find that over time, people usually remember things they feel didn’t go so well, making us feel less positive about lessons than if we strive to capture the positive things early as well. You can use the filter function to choose one class and see all your reflections on their lessons: this will help you spot positive changes that come up multiple times that you might not notice otherwise.

Your reflections will help you to see the positives even at the end of a long week, and to think about the longer-term development of your teaching practice and your relationships with your students, as well as the learning taking place in your classroom.