How to Reflect on Your Own Teaching: The Three-Question Method

Last updated on: 16th October, 2026
IRIS Connect

Laura Killeen, a lead practitioner at Moreton School in Wolverhampton, in a recent IRIS Connect webinar pointed out that teaching is a profession that goes in cold. “We plan a lesson and then we just go and teach it. We don’t rehearse it. We don’t do a dry run.”

Every framework, mentor meeting, and teaching standard then asks you to reflect on it. Teachers’ Standard 4 is specific, asking teachers to “reflect systematically on the effectiveness of lessons and approaches to teaching“. What none of them explains is when and how, exactly, you are supposed to do that.

As Laura put it, “you are thinking about the lesson. You’re probably thinking about the next lesson… I need to make sure I’ve got my glue sticks in at the end. The cognitive load for us teachers is massive… How effectively can we really reflect six periods a day, five days a week?”

Reflection built on recollection alone, at the end of a day like that, is built on the least reliable record you have. If your school uses IRIS Connect, you already have the part that fixes that. What follows is what to do with it.

Why Reflection Turns Experience Into Expertise

Dewey argued in 1933 that we learn not from experience itself but from reflecting on it. Repetition embeds habits, good and bad, and structured reflection is what turns the hours into deliberate improvement. Schön (1983) then separated reflection in action, made mid-lesson, from reflection on action, the calmer examination afterwards.

Reflection is a skill, not a personality trait, which means it improves with structure and practice. Laura is honest about her own start: “When I first started teaching, I was my own worst critic.” She is equally clear about the other half of the problem: there were things going on in her lessons she simply had no awareness of. She also says self-reflection comes with time, and that some teachers find it much harder than others.

What Video Changes, and What It Does Not

While you manage thirty pupils, no amount of skill lets you also track your own questioning, pacing, and wait time. Afterwards, memory keeps what stood out and discards the rest. What you remember is mostly what you did, not how pupils responded, and that’s what really counts.

Video replaces recollection with a record you can pause and rewind. A lesson stops being a memory and becomes evidence you can analyse calmly after the event. Reviewing footage also develops the two capacities Sherin and van Es call professional vision, and which Gaudin and Chaliès (2015) trace across the wider literature: selective attention, which is spotting the moments that matter, and knowledge-based reasoning, which is interpreting them rather than describing them.

Laura describes the moment it pays off: “Oh, I didn’t notice that before. This is where it all sort of unravelled.”

She is blunt about what recording on its own achieves, too: “You can record as many lessons as you like, but a video nobody watches back is of little use to anyone.” Tripp and Rich (2012) reached the same conclusion after reviewing 63 studies of teachers analysing their own lessons: watching the video does not, on its own, produce learning. The camera is not the intervention. The structure you bring to the footage is.

Three Questions That Structure Every Reflection

Analysing your own teaching is harder than analysing somebody else’s. Kleinknecht and Schneider (2013) watched ten teachers work with footage of themselves and footage of a colleague, and concluded that self-video calls for more preparation and scaffolding.

The cycle below offers a simple, yet powerful structure to guide that activity. It was first set out by Borton (1970) and developed by Driscoll (1994) and by Rolfe, Freshwater, and Jasper (2001). It asks three questions in order.

What? Describe what happened. Record an ordinary segment of three to five minutes around your focus, not the whole hour. Watch it once without pausing. Laura hears the objection constantly: “I don’t want to listen to myself. I don’t want to watch myself back. It’s embarrassing.” The first viewing is there to get that reaction out of the way. Then re-watch and note only what is observable: who did what, what was said, what followed. Leave those notes as time-stamped comments on the video timeline, so each observation stays attached to the moment it came from rather than sitting in a separate document you have to cross-reference later.

So what? Make sense of what you see. Shift your attention to the pupils. At each marked moment, ask what the cue signals: understanding, confusion, or disengagement. Link it to a principle or technique you already know, so your reading is reasoned rather than impressionistic. If you cannot put a name to what you are looking at, the Teaching Techniques library is a quick way to find the right one.

Now what? Decide and act. Choose one change, not a list, and make it observable, so the next recording tells you whether it happened. Then plan the re-record: the lesson, and the date. Setting it as an Objective keeps the commitment and the next clip in the same place, which matters more than it sounds when six weeks have passed and neither of you can remember what was agreed.

The whole loop in one example

What: in a four-minute clip, a teacher takes the first hand up within about two seconds, on three occasions.
So what: pupils who needed longer to think were left out, so short wait time was narrowing who took part.
Now what: in the next clip, hold a deliberate three-second pause before taking answers, and see whether more pupils attempt a response.

Mary Budd Rowe’s wait time research, published in 1986, found that teachers typically wait less than a second, and that pausing for three seconds or more improves the length and quality of pupils’ answers. Four decades on, it is still the reference point for the construct. A three-second pause is small enough to change on Monday.

Now what becomes the next What. That is the loop.

Three Traps to Avoid

The self-criticism spiral. Describe before you evaluate. That is why What comes first.
Only seeing what you expected. Let the footage surprise you, then follow the surprise.
Stopping at So what. Insight with no next step will not change practice.

The Fourth Trap: Reflecting Entirely Alone

This one deserves more attention than the other three. Brookfield (1995) argues that critical reflection needs four lenses: your pupils’ eyes, your colleagues’ perceptions, relevant theory, and your own experience. Three of the four come from outside you.

The simplest way is to share a two-minute clip with one colleague you choose, with a single specific question attached, and let them answer it as comments on the timeline. Nobody needs cover, and nobody has to be free at the same time as anybody else. Laura’s school paired staff into trios that mixed experience and role, sharing clips sideways rather than upwards. The benefit ran both ways. Watching a colleague teach is one of the fastest routes to new options in your own practice, and clips from your own school carry a credibility that published exemplars cannot.

To get a different perspective, AI Insights can be a useful alternative. It can analyse the recording against a chosen focus and return time-stamped moments with reflective prompts. Laura’s view of it: “IRIS Connect’s AI Insights are a transformative tool for professional development. They provide objective, in-depth analysis of teaching, removing the emotional weight and personal bias often linked to peer or line manager feedback.The result is a fuller, more accurate picture that supports staff to effectively reflect on their practice.”

For CPD Leads: Reflection Needs Time and Safety

In order for this to work, leadership needs to commit to two conditions:

The first is protected time. Laura is candid that this took a fight: “I was absolutely fighting for time.” Her school now gives reflection a CPD slot each half term, including around 20 minutes for teachers to watch their own footage back. Reflection stops being extra work once it appears on the timetable.

The second is ownership. The teacher decides what is recorded and who sees it, and reflection stays separate from appraisal, because the moment video becomes evaluative, candour disappears. Laura’s verdict on the trios: “It’s been really good for staff wellbeing.”

Neither condition is free. Half a term’s CPD slot is a real trade against everything else competing for it. The schools where this holds have decided that watching your own teaching back earns that time, and they protect it when the calendar gets tight.

Start With Five Minutes

You do not need a new initiative for this, or permission, or a free afternoon. Book the kit, record five minutes of an ordinary lesson this week, and ask What, So what, and Now what. Change one thing, then film it again. If you want the questions prompted for you as you go, our Guided Reflection Pathways run the same loop with the prompts and the next steps built in.

You cannot rehearse a lesson before you teach it. Watching it back afterwards is the closest the job comes to a dry run, and it is what separates ten years of teaching from ten years of getting better at it. The pupils in front of you are the ones who feel that difference.
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References

Borton, T. (1970) Reach, Touch and Teach: Student Concerns and Process Education. New York: McGraw-Hill. Model summary: University of Edinburgh Reflection Toolkit.
Brookfield, S. (1995) Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Department for Education (2021) Teachers’ Standards, Standard 4(d)
Dewey, J. (1933) How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. Boston: D. C. Heath.
Driscoll, J. (1994) ‘Reflective practice for practise’. Senior Nurse, 13(7), pp. 47-50.
Gaudin, C. and Chaliès, S. (2015) ‘Video viewing in teacher education and professional development: a literature review’. Educational Research Review, 16, pp. 41-67.
Kleinknecht, M. and Schneider, J. (2013) ‘What do teachers think and feel when analyzing videos of themselves and other teachers teaching?’ Teaching and Teacher Education, 33, pp. 13-23.
Rolfe, G., Freshwater, D. and Jasper, M. (2001) Critical Reflection for Nursing and the Helping Professions: A User’s Guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rowe, M. B. (1986) ‘Wait time: slowing down may be a way of speeding up!’ Journal of Teacher Education, 37(1), pp. 43-50.
Schön, D. A. (1983) The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
Sherin, M. G. and van Es, E. A. (2009) ‘Effects of video club participation on teachers’ professional vision’. Journal of Teacher Education, 60(1), pp. 20-37.
Tripp, T. and Rich, P. (2012) ‘Using video to analyze one’s own teaching’. British Journal of Educational Technology, 43(4), pp. 678-704.

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