We make a lot of choices as teachers over a school year.

A quick sampling to consider:

• How are desks arranged in your classroom—and how often does that change?

• What do opening/closing procedures look like in your lessons?

• If you have control over grading policy (%’s for grades, late penalties, minimum grades, etc.)—what is something you do that is different than others in your building?

• What content/materials did you choose to bring into your classroom, especially if they’re different than others teaching a similar course?

• How do your lessons balance collaboration versus teacher-driven instruction versus independent work time?

• Pacing: how fast does your course move? (Along with that: what amount of homework do students regularly have?)

• How do you choose to assess your students’ learning—and what does feedback look like?

• What is your own approach like as a teacher when a student shows up having been absent for an extended stretch?

Yes: context matters. Some teachers have more control over their curriculum than others; other teachers have more flexibility on what specific policies look like in their individual classroom. Some schools have pretty consistent alignment across PLC’s or evening building-wide both with content and systems. In others, you’re on an island.

Acknowledging different contexts, though, I believe teachers still make a lot of choices no matter their context.

However, in my experience, far too often there is too little time actually spent considering and reflecting upon the choices we make as teachers.

So that’s what I wanted to write about today—along with a tool that I’m using refocus my own reflections around the choices I’ve made in my classroom this year.

Framing Reflection Around Choices

Over the years, I’ve filled out many end-of-year forms and self-evaluations, ranging from those aligned with the Charlotte Danielson rubric to extensive checklists that get filed away to gather dust or, perhaps even worse, are submitted into some digital ether to become perpetually archived.

Then it is summer.

Then a new school year begins.

Rinse/repeat, again and again.

What I think would be much more beneficial for all teachers before the school year ends: to think back and “audit” a handful of key choices you made over the school year and then, following your own self-reflection, to have a conversation with someone else about how these choices went and what you want to take away going forward. (Or potentially to have that conversation with your students!)

For the individual reflection stage of this, I came up with this template for myself that others are welcome to use:

• Preview of the template (also pictured above)

• Link to create your own to use

• Sample of my own filled out for my English 10 course

The goal in designing this was to create a place to consider the rationale behind choices I made, both the benefits and downsides of those choices—with individual student outcomes and the classroom community overall—as well as my own learning from them as I look forward to future years.

Why two different choices? For me, this allows me to aim for a balance between a choice I feel relatively good about along with one that I’m frustrated with. (I also happen to believe that there is a quantity v. quality relationship with reflection, as too much ends up yielding, in my experience, quite little.)

Keep it simple, too! Start with a simple question: what is an important or interesting choice you made as a teacher? Give yourself time to think about it a bit, and then, potentially, to reflect on it more intentionally through writing.