Friday Gem #41 – ‘Reflect’ check-in app in Teams

Teaching and Learning Gem #41 – ‘Reflect’ check-in app in Microsoft Teams

Helen, Misha and Suzy trialled the new ‘Reflect’ app in Microsoft Teams with some of their classes this week. It allows teachers to ‘check-in’ easily with how students are feeling. We used it for academic purposes to encourage students to reflect on how they feel about their progress. Watch this video to find out more about it.

How it works

  • Once you have installed the app in Teams, you click on the ‘Reflect’ icon when you start a new conversation in the general channel.
  • You select a question from the drop-down list i.e. ‘How are you feeling about the material we covered today?’  or ‘How do you feel about your progress in this class?’ or ‘How do you feel about your last assignment.’ There are lots of options.
  • Students then select an emoji to represent their feeling.
  • They can further select from some adjectives i.e. ‘motivated’, ‘confident’, ‘ambitious’, ‘creative’, ‘happy’ etc.
  • You can set it so that only the teacher can see the responses (see below some screenshots from Helen for what the teacher sees):

Benefits

  • It is super quick and easy to use for both teachers and students.
  • The student is encouraged to reflect.
  • It makes every student’s feelings visible to the teacher.
  • The teacher can monitor the whole class spread of feelings, as well as dig down into individuals.
  • The teacher can review the responses using Insights to see patterns across the class and to track students attitudes over time.
  • The teacher can then adapt teaching if necessary or arrange one-to-one meetings with any student of concern.
  • It can be an opportunity for students almost to give feedback to the teacher.

Drawbacks

  • You can’t write your own question – you have to use one from the list (although the consistency in question does allow for tracking over time).
  • Students can’t add any further comments themselves (again, this keeps it quick and not onerous, but could be perceived as a drawback).
  • It is fairly broad-brush and definitely requires teachers to be proactive in digging into why a student might feel a certain way. It could be a good springboard into that discussion, though.