13.5 The Reflective Cycle: Planning, Teaching, Assessment, and Decision Making
Key Takeaways
- The reflective cycle in physical education runs planning, teaching, assessment, and reflection continuously, with each phase informing the next rather than ending the sequence.
- Reflection-in-action occurs during teaching and changes the lesson in progress, while reflection-on-action occurs afterward and changes the next lesson; both are required.
- Reflection becomes professional practice rather than impression when it is grounded in evidence -- student assessment data, activity time, participation counts, video, and observation feedback.
- Systematic self-observation tools such as academic learning time, feedback distribution counts, and video review reveal patterns a teacher cannot detect from memory.
- Action research applies the cycle formally: a teacher poses a question about their own practice, collects classroom data, changes something, and evaluates the effect.
The Cycle
The blueprint names the phases explicitly: planning, teaching, assessment, and reflection.
- Planning -- objectives derived from standards and from what assessment showed last time; tasks, progressions, organization, and assessment designed together
- Teaching -- delivery, with in-the-moment adjustment
- Assessment -- collecting evidence of what students actually learned
- Reflection -- interpreting that evidence and deciding what changes
The cycle's defining property is that reflection feeds planning, so it never terminates. A teacher who plans, teaches, assesses, records the grade, and moves on has run a line, not a cycle, and the same lesson will fail the same way next year.
Reflection-in-Action and Reflection-on-Action
| Reflection-in-action | Reflection-on-action | |
|---|---|---|
| When | During teaching | After teaching |
| Question | "This is not working -- what do I change right now?" | "Why did that happen, and what will I do differently?" |
| Example | Two thirds of the class is failing the task, so the teacher enlarges the target mid-lesson | Reviewing the assessment data and redesigning the progression for next year |
| Requires | Monitoring skill and a repertoire of adjustments | Evidence, time, and honesty |
Both matter. Reflection-in-action rescues the lesson in front of you; reflection-on-action improves every lesson after it. Novice teachers typically have limited reflection-in-action because their attention is consumed by managing the lesson, which is why routines that free attention are a prerequisite for it.
A third form, reflection-for-action, is anticipatory: thinking ahead about what is likely to go wrong and preparing the adjustment. It is what a well-written lesson plan with contingencies actually is.
Grounding Reflection in Evidence
Unaided memory is a poor record. "That went well" and "they were engaged" are impressions, and they systematically favor the students the teacher interacted with most. Evidence sources:
| Source | What it reveals |
|---|---|
| Student assessment data | Whether the objective was met, and by whom |
| Activity time measurement | The share of the lesson students spent actually moving |
| Academic learning time in physical education (ALT-PE) | Time spent in motor-appropriate activity at a success rate that produces learning -- the most informative single measure of lesson quality |
| Feedback distribution count | Who actually received teacher feedback, and how often |
| Video of your own teaching | Positioning, instruction length, transitions, whom you looked at |
| Student voice | Exit tickets and surveys about what was clear, hard, and enjoyable |
| Peer observation | An outside eye on a focused question you specify |
| Participation and attendance patterns | Who is disengaging, and when it started |
Self-observation instruments worth using
Activity time: have an observer or a video record start and stop timestamps for management, instruction, and activity. Most teachers substantially overestimate their activity time.
ALT-PE: sample individual students at intervals and record whether they are engaged in motor-appropriate activity with a workable success rate. It exposes the student who was present, compliant, and learning nothing.
Feedback distribution: mark a class roster each time you give an individual a piece of feedback. The reliable finding is that feedback concentrates on the most skilled and the most disruptive, and that a substantial group receives none.
Instruction episode length: time each instructional episode. Episodes routinely run two to three times longer than the teacher believes.
Structured Reflection Questions
After a lesson:
- Did students meet the objective? What is the evidence, not the impression?
- Who did not, and what does that group have in common?
- How much of the period was activity time?
- Was the task at the right difficulty? What was the success rate?
- Who received my attention and feedback? Who did not?
- What management or transition cost the most time?
- What will I change, specifically, next time?
The last question is what converts reflection into practice. A reflection that ends without a specific change is a diary entry.
Reflection on the Program
The cycle also operates above the lesson:
- Unit level: did the assessment show the unit's outcomes were met? Was the time allocation right? What would you cut or extend?
- Program level: does the year's scope and sequence actually cover the standards? Are all students served, or does the program favor a subset? What does participation data show over time?
- Professional level: what does the pattern across lessons say about a skill you need to develop, and what learning will you pursue?
Action Research
Action research is the reflective cycle made formal and is the structure the blueprint's reflection topic points toward at its most rigorous:
- Pose a question about your own practice -- "Does giving students a choice of task level increase activity time in my sixth-grade classes?"
- Review what is already known
- Collect baseline data in your own classes
- Implement the change systematically
- Collect data again using the same measure
- Analyze and interpret
- Act -- keep, modify, or abandon the change
- Share with colleagues, which is what makes it research rather than tinkering
Its value is that it produces evidence about your students in your setting, which no published study can supply.
Conditions That Make Reflection Happen
Reflection fails for predictable structural reasons: no time, no evidence, no outside perspective, and no safety to admit that something did not work. The countermeasures are equally practical -- a brief structured protocol rather than open-ended journaling, one measure collected per lesson rather than a full audit, a trusted colleague for reciprocal observation, and a professional learning community where analyzing a failed lesson is normal rather than risky.
Common Praxis Traps
- Trap 1: Reflection as impression. "It went well" is not evidence.
- Trap 2: Ending reflection without a specific change. Name what you will do differently.
- Trap 3: Assuming your activity time is high. Measure it.
- Trap 4: Assuming feedback is distributed evenly. Count it.
- Trap 5: Treating the cycle as linear. Reflection feeds planning.
- Trap 6: Reflecting only on lessons. Unit, program, and professional levels matter too.
Midway through a lesson a teacher notices that most students are failing the task, so the teacher enlarges the target and shortens the distance immediately. This is an example of:
A teacher believes students are highly active during lessons. Which evidence would most directly test this belief?
What most reliably distinguishes professional reflection from a personal impression of how a lesson went?
A teacher wonders whether offering students a choice of task difficulty increases activity time in sixth-grade classes, collects baseline activity-time data, implements the choice structure, measures again, and shares the results with the department. This process is best described as: