A Simple Reflection Protocol Every School Leader Should Use | E255

Season #8 December 30, 2025

As the year comes to a close, great leaders don’t just move on—they pause, reflect, and intentionally prepare for what’s next. In this episode, Ryan Steuer shares a powerful four-bucket reflection protocol used at Magnify Learning to help leadership teams identify what’s working, what’s broken, what’s confusing, and what truly mattered most.

This simple but effective structure can be used at the end of a school year, quarter, or major initiative—and it creates clarity, trust, and momentum for the future.

The 4-Bucket Reflection Protocol

1. What Worked

Leaders begin by naming the practices, systems, and initiatives that genuinely moved the work forward.

Examples include:

Improved meeting structures or rhythms
Classroom walkthroughs that led to visible instructional shifts
Communication strategies that strengthened alignment
Initiatives with a clear beginning, middle, and end

This step reinforces progress, boosts morale, and helps teams identify what should continue.

2. What’s Broken

Next, teams openly name systems or processes that didn’t work as intended.

These might include:

Meetings that lack purpose or impact
Communication processes that vary across schools
Initiatives that sounded good but fell flat in practice

This bucket invites honest feedback without judgment and signals that leadership is listening—and willing to improve systems, not blame people.

3. What’s Confusing

Confusion often hides beneath the surface, especially in complex systems. This bucket creates language for naming unclear expectations or mixed messages.

Common examples include:

Conflicting directions about autonomy vs. compliance
Overlapping initiatives with unclear priorities
Communication that unintentionally sends mixed signals

Addressing confusion strengthens trust and prevents frustration from turning into disengagement.

4. Favorites

The final bucket captures what filled people’s cups—the moments that mattered most.

Favorites often include:

Powerful PBL units and student exhibitions
Community partnerships that exceeded expectations
Student stories that reminded teams why the work matters

This bucket reveals what motivates the team and where leaders should invest more energy moving forward.

Why This Protocol Works

Encourages honest, structured reflection
Creates shared language for feedback
Improves systems without defensiveness
Strengthens culture and psychological safety
Helps teams get 1% better through clarity

Ryan emphasizes that many issues—especially confusion—can be resolved immediately once surfaced. Over time, this protocol becomes part of the team’s culture, not just an annual exercise.

How to Use It

End of the calendar year or school year
Quarterly leadership reflection
After a major initiative or rollout
With district teams, principals, or coaches

Leaders can run it individually first, then with teams to maximize insight and impact.

Resource Mentioned

PBL Readiness Scorecard: Assess your school or district’s readiness for Project Based Learning and receive personalized next steps at pblscore.com

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the PBL Simplified podcast for administrators brought to you by Magnify Learning, your customized PBL partner. From over a decade of experience with you in the trenches, we are bringing you this top rated educational podcast designed for visionary school administrators seeking to transform their schools with project-based learning. Launch your vision, live your why, and lead inspired. Here's your host, Ryan Stoyer.
Oh, it's been a great year. I hope you enjoyed this school year. I hope you had a great end to it and I hope you're looking forward to this next school year. Thanks for joining me today. My name is Ryan Story. I'm CEO of Magnified Learning and I host the PBL Simplified podcast. And if you're listening to this one, when it comes out, uh, it's right at the end of the year. So, we're going to reflect a little bit. We've got a protocol that we use for that.
And even if you're catching this after the new year, this is a protocol you probably want to put in your back pocket. It's a fun one to use. We use it quarterly inhouse here at Magnify Learning. Got it from Dave Ramsey's group and we like it a lot. So, I wanted to share that today. If you're trying to figure out the end of the school year as you look to the new year, if you're ready for a PBL movement, I want you go to pblscore.com. pblscore.com. And it's a super simple form. Uh it's pretty slick actually. And as you fill it out, it individualized is the results that it kicks out for you. So, you put in what are the things that you're doing well? What are some things some areas of growth? At the end, it's going to spit out a score for you and it's going to give you suggestions on what you can do to magnify those things you're doing great and how you can improve some of those areas of growth. And we give you those free resources right off the bat. So, it's pretty neat. pblscore.com.
Check it out. So, today we're talking about a reflection exercise that you can do on the year. You can use it quarterly. You can use it at the end of a big project. A lot of ways to use it. We're going to look at four different areas. And we like to do this as a team. You can do it individually as a leader first, however you want to do it to try it out. We've got four different areas: things that worked, things that are broken, things that are confusing, and the one that we've actually added is some of your favorites.
So, when you look back at 2025, what are some things that worked for you? Maybe you changed your meeting rhythms. Maybe you changed how you start meetings. Maybe you start people first. You had some kind of an icebreaker. You used to think they were goofy, but now you know it's for real. By the way, it is. There's a lot of research behind it. But let's say that you changed that and it's working out now. You put that under worked.
Maybe you had a new kind of mini initiative and like you could see the beginning, you could see the end and it worked. Uh let's say you did some walkthroughs. You know, depending on where you're at in your world, you do some walkthroughs and you left back some some positive notes for people. Those probably worked. But also, you saw some practices in the classrooms that you visited that were things that you were looking for as a district. Ah, that worked, right? Maybe you did some parent surveys, whatever those things are, like what worked and have a really low bar for this, right? Just start listing out all the things that worked. And when you're doing this as a group, everybody gets to shout out things that worked and they can plus one things and they can bounce off of that idea and say, "Yeah, that worked and so did this and actually helped this other thing work." You get this whole list of things that worked.
Because let's be honest, as you were in the heat of things, sometimes it's hard to tell. And even if it did work, you don't always get to acknowledge it, right? So, this is a time with your team to stop and say, "Hey, we're doing things and it's working, right? Like, we're moving in the right direction. We're getting it 1% better every day. Let's keep going." And it's a super encouraging piece. And not just encouraging, though, because if something's working now, you know, you should keep doing it, right? And we're going to get into a couple other categories. The next category, in fact, is broken.
So, what are the things that are just broken? Again, could be a communication process that you have could be a newsletter, could be PLC's, could be a process at a specific school, right? If you're assistant superintendent over multiple schools and you know, you've got some communication pieces that are working here but not there. Like it works at this elementary, it's broken at that elementary. Let's just name that. Again, as a team, this is really powerful as far as voice and choice. If you got coaches in the room or some of your principal leaders and they get to say like, I appreciate that We added this monthly meeting for principles, but it's a little broken. I'm not getting the value out of it that I think we should be getting. Great. Put it down. Don't judge it. Uh you can ask some clarifying questions, but in general, as a leader, you want to say, "Thank you. Thank you for bringing up that this seems broken. I want to make sure that we look at this and make it as effective and efficient as possible." And as soon as you do that, the floodgates will open. Right? So, if you don't want to hear really honest feedback, don't do that. But if you want honest feedback from your team, this is a great way to get it. What is broken?
And then as soon as somebody gives you a real response, like here's a thing that we thought was going to work and it didn't, it's broken. Say, "Wow, thank you for bringing that to my attention. Uh, let's talk about that." Like we're going to bookmark that and we will talk about that later. Like we're going to bring that up in a meeting. Oh, okay. And all the other leaders in the room go, "Okay, like she's listening. Let's let's do more of this. So now you're going to get all these things that are broken. You're going to get a whole list of things. And some of them you're going to be like, "Oh man, I thought that was working. I thought that was great." But you can always go back and say, "Well, how is this broken? Can you give me some more?" I would recommend at first though just getting them all on paper and then you can go back and ask some clarifying questions about the things that are broken because you're obviously going to want to try to fix them.
So you're going to need some more clarity on those. But the first round of this, you just get them all on paper. Now come back and say well can you clarify like why that meeting is not working is it the topic is it the process is it the timing and you might find out it's just the timing might just be bad timing right or u we've got too much sitting getting there right and they need some collaborative portions or you've moved collaborative and they don't like it but you're okay with that well that's fine you right so maybe it's not as broken as it seems and it's how you want it to go. Either way you want to get it out there.
The third bucket is confusing. This is a really neat bucket actually and tends to be one that gets filled as we start to talk about this. What are some things that are confusing and typically these are around communication processes is I thought we did it this way. It seems like you want it done a different way. It seems it's confusing like you said parent night was totally up to us and but then you said we had to do these three things. That's kind of confusing. And same thing you want to reward especially that first person that goes that's uh that's vulnerable says here's this confusing thing you want to reward that and say ah thank you so much for bringing that up. I didn't even notice that those things kind of crossed paths right there and there's some tension there. I could see how that would definitely be confusing. Do we have other things like that that are confusing because it's a you know we're a big district. We got a lot of lot of things going on a lot of initiatives a lot of people that we're trying to help move forward. So I could see that there could definitely be some things that are confusing.
So when you're bringing these things up broken and confusing. Especially, it's nice to kind of put the precursor out there that there's a reason that they could be broken. There's a reason for it to be confusing. So, someone's not just thinking, "Ah, it's just me. I'm just confused on this." But you'd say, "Well, you know, I see how those two things could be conflicting. I'm glad we're getting to meet monthly now. Um, I could see there could be some other confusing things out there. Does anybody else have another one? And another one. And another one." And same thing, get them all down. And then once you have all the confusing bucket listed out. Now go back and ask for clarification. Well, what happened here? What happened here? Can you give me some more reasoning about why this was confusing? If you start asking the questions right away after the first one, then sometimes people are are going to think you're defensive and you might get defensive because undoubtedly you didn't mean for it to be confusing. So somewhere it got messed up and it might be the person that bring it up, might be you, it doesn't matter.
You want to get them all on paper and then can go back and ask for clarification. We're not trying to be defensive here. We're trying to fix the system. So, what worked? What's broken? What's confusing? And the fourth one we like is is just what's your favorite? Like what are some of the favorite things that happened in 2025? And it could be uh a PBL unit that the end products were just awesome, right? Or some community partners that just really crushed it for you. Or maybe you had an expo in like second grade. Second graders absolutely just did a wonderful job. Uh they tied in the community partner. Well, that might be your favorite. It might be a student story. This could be a great time to tell a student story as a favorite. And so again, just this open bucket of reflection of what are the things that were your favorite this year or this quarter? And as you hear those types of things, now you know like what is important to your team? What makes them tick?
You know things that again like we've gone through the things that are confusing and broken. You know where their head goes. But what are the things that are their favorite? How can you enhance some of those things? How can you put a spotlight on those things? Because that's what's filling their bucket. So, as you can do more of that, you're filling their bucket and getting them fired up about it.
Quick protocol as far as reflection. Again, you can do it for the whole year. You can do it for the month. You can do it for the quarter. We do it at least quarterly here at Magnify Learning. And it's super helpful as a leader from my position as CEO. I want to know, you know, what's going on out there. um what are the things that are working really well? Where where do we have some confusion or what's just plain broken? Right? We found several of those things throughout the years. I mean, a lot of it's communication. So, those things are confusing even before we leave this reflection meeting. We found that that they're either the confusion is taken care of or we've put in a new process or edited a different process so that we've kind of fixed that. So, we're not just identifying problems to then be fixed later. Some of them we fixed right then and there, which is obviously great because you're getting that that 1% better, right? By fixing these small things and it encourages you and your team to speak up about these things. You're giving language to things like, hey, you just rol we rolled this out, but this is kind of confusing. Okay, awesome. Let's talk about it. And now you don't have to wait for the end of the quarter to to do the official protocol. It's become a part of your culture that your team knows that if something's confusing or broken that here's here's how we do it. bring that up and hopefully you're celebrating those wins throughout the year as well and throughout the quarter. So, use that protocol as you like. Uh feel free to kind of mess with the the the titles as well, but having those four buckets, letting people talk through them and then addressing them is a way that we've found is super helpful for reflection and for solving some of those problems that are a little ambiguous and hard to take care of. All right, I hope this gets you prepared for the new year, reflected on last year, prepared for the new year. Go lead inspired.
That's just just what I needed to bring PBL to my school. If that sounds like you, please consider rating and reviewing the show. It only takes 2 minutes to scroll to the bottom, tap to rate with five stars, and select write a review. Then be sure to let us know what was most helpful about that episode. Your review helps the next inspired leader just like you find their why and lead inspired.