What separates surface-level learning from the kind that truly sticks? According to veteran educators Lynne Dorfman, Catherine Gehman, Pérsida Himmele, and Aileen Hower, the answer is reflection—and it's one of the most underused tools in a teacher's toolkit. In their new book Now That I Think About It: Teaching Your Students to Be Reflective and Effective Learners, the authors draw on research and decades of classroom experience to offer practical strategies for weaving reflective practice into everyday instruction across grade levels and subject areas, with the goal of deepening student understanding, building agency, and boosting achievement.
The following excerpt introduces the book's core framework for thinking about reflection in three distinct ways: as a magnifying glass for meaning making, as a mirror for metacognition, and as a map for metastrategic thinking.
It’s safe to say that little lasting learning takes place without reflection. Reflection engages students in higher-order thinking: analysis, meaning making, and problem solving. It’s how students absorb what has been presented to them, process what works and what doesn’t work in relation to their own learning, and calibrate the best approach to completing a task.
As Porter (2019) puts it, “Reflection gives the brain an opportunity to pause amidst the chaos, untangle and sort through observations and experiences, consider multiple possible interpretations, and create meaning” (p. 39). Pausing to reflect on learning is an essential aspect of processing deeper meaning. As educators, we can plan for these pauses: create regular opportunities for reflection and teach students what to do with them.
What We Mean by Reflection
Our understanding of reflection is rooted in research, our lived experiences as classroom teachers, and our own learning journeys. As we see it, reflection is a deliberate, structured inquiry that moves learners through the complexities of thoughtful examination, giving pause to that which is perplexing, puzzling, and surprising so that the learners can repackage their thinking, create a plan, and move forward with deeper and more meaningful insights and improved achievement.
Reflection is multifaceted, with three important aspects:
Looking at—Reflection as a magnifying glass (meaning making);
Looking in—Reflection as a mirror (metacognition); and
Looking out—Reflection as a map (metastrategic thinking).
Metacognition, or reflection on one’s own learning, is like looking into a metaphorical mirror.
Reflection as a Magnifying Glass
Reflection as meaning making requires learners to focus on what is presented or taught to more thoroughly absorb the lesson. It ought to be happening all the time, every day, but it’s not likely to do so without teacher intentionality.
To make meaning, students need to follow up on the input they receive from the teacher, texts, and peers by analyzing, summarizing, or in some other way repackaging that input to perform the subsequent task. It requires that students closely examine the lesson to turn out a meaningful product, whether that be a verbal, written, visual, or other type of explanation or analysis. This form of reflection not only ensures that learning has occurred but also provides teachers with visual evidence of the students’ learning. Intentionally planning ways for students to demonstrate meaning making increases the likelihood that students will process what they’ve been taught.
Reflection as a Mirror
One of the typical non-education-related definitions for reflection is an image projected in a mirror or on a shiny surface. Metacognition, or reflection on one’s own learning, is like looking into a metaphorical mirror, and it can be an enlightening and effective method for learning.
Unlike analyzing or processing presented content, at its core, metacognition requires learners to hold up a mirror to focus on their own learning processes and analyze what works best for them and what isn’t working. Thinking about their thinking, making decisions based on what they know works, and minimizing what doesn’t work provide students with powerful tools and habits for helping them improve their learning.
Reflection as a Map
Reflection as a map, or metastrategic thinking, is the big-picture evaluation that happens when learners look ahead. Examples include the processes by which learners decide on the best way to complete a task or analyze the implications of newly learned information. It might also look like a learner’s reflective pause as they focus on how they might solve a problem, conduct an experiment, effectively construct an argument, write a convincing essay, or draft a moving narrative.
Teachers can support students in the process of thinking ahead by having them reflect on simple prompts like the following as they read or plan projects:
- Why didn’t my experiment work?
- What could I have done differently?
- Will this mathematical procedure always work? Why or why not?
- Is this the best/easiest way to solve this problem? Why or why not?
- What is the author’s bias?
- What will people who read my essay be thinking as they read it? How will I address that?
In every content area, asking students to dig deeply and analyze implications of what they’re learning or producing can lead to metastrategic thinking—and to the natural next step of considering how to deal with potential implications. Intentionally structuring learning experiences to include reflection fosters this type of analysis.
Reflection as a map, or metastrategic thinking, is the big-picture evaluation that happens when learners look ahead.
Creating a Culture of Reflection
Reading and writing play a critical role in student reflection. Skilled readers use prior knowledge to question, visualize, predict, and apply other reading strategies. But the entire academic day is rife with opportunities to ask students to reflect on the tools, knowledge, and expectations they bring to a science, history, or mathematics text with prompts such as the following:
- What are you seeing? (reflection as a magnifying glass)
- What is working for you, and how do you see yourself growing? (reflection as a mirror)
- What will you need to do to be successful? (reflection as a map)
Reflection benefits every student, but it is especially crucial for students learning English as an additional language. In addition to being presented with new content, multilingual learners (MLs) face challenges related to making sense of in a language that is new to them. Because language is acquired by experiencing and practicing it in contexts we understand, building context around new learning through reflection increases MLs’ comprehension of both the content and the language.
At its core, reflection is more than just looking back on learning experiences; it is an intentional, engaging process that deepens understanding, sharpens self-awareness, and guides or affects future decision making. Reflection creates space for learning to be an active, continuous, and recursive process. In the absence of reflection, there’s a risk that learning will become shallow, rote, passive, disconnected, and easily forgotten.
Now That I Think About It
With AI transforming the education experience, it's more important than ever to empower students to be meaning makers, metacognitive learners, and metastrategic thinkers. Get started here.
Pérsida Himmele, PhD, is a professor of Teacher Education at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, where she has taught for more than 20 years. She has 10 years of public school experience as an elementary and middle school bilingual and multilingual classroom teacher in New York and California, as well as a district administrator in Pennsylvania.
She has been a consultant to various school districts, the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and educational entities around the world. She is the co-author of several ASCD books and resources, including Total Participation Techniques, 3rd Edition.
Pérsida Himmele, PhD, is a professor of teacher education at Millersville University, where she has taught for more than 20 years. She has 10 years of public school experience as an elementary and middle school bilingual and multilingual classroom teacher in New York and California and as a district administrator in Pennsylvania.
Pérsida's latest coauthored book is Now That I Think About It: Teaching Your Students to Be Reflective and Effective Learners; she and her husband, William Himmele, have collaborated to write several ASCD books and resources, including the bestseller Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner. She can be reached via her website.
