The best teachers treat their own teaching as something worth studying. Four short lessons on turning experience into improvement — and into shared knowledge — then a self-check.
Reflection that stays at ‘that lesson went badly’ rarely changes anything. Structured reflection moves you from describing the experience to making sense of it and deciding what to do next.
Your own impressions are a start, but they are one source and an easily biased one. Triangulating across several kinds of evidence gives you a fairer picture of what is actually happening.
The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning takes reflection one step further: you investigate a question about your teaching systematically, and you make the findings public so others can build on them.
Reflection and evidence are most useful when you can show them. A teaching portfolio gathers your practice, your reasoning, and your impact in one place — for development, review, and promotion.