IT Admin Guide to Reflect in Microsoft Teams

This document provides information concerning Microsoft Reflect – an integral part of Education Insights in Microsoft Teams. Reflect helps students recognize and navigate their emotions by providing regular opportunities to share and be heard. Reflect can help broaden learners' emotional vocabulary and deepen empathy for their peers while also providing valuable feedback to educators for a healthy classroom community.

This free check-in app uses emojis and characters to help students develop emotional granularity. Research demonstrates that explicit teaching of social and emotional skills improves student academic and behavioral performance and has life-long positive impacts.

Privacy and Security

Reflect follows the same privacy and security standards as Education Insights to protect students' sensitive information.

Reflect, as part of Microsoft 365, meets national, regional, and industry-specific regulations for data collection and use, including GDPR and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) that protects the privacy of students' education records.

The data belongs to the institution, and Microsoft only collects the data and stores it. Microsoft personnel can't access the data or see it, except as allowed by compliance in an audited way to maintain the service, such as data recovery.

Students never see the names of other students, only how they responded. While they can see the distribution of responses, they cannot see names associated with each reflection.

Note

If less than five students respond, no data is shown to the students. This is to minimize the possibility of students identifying each other's responses.

Tip

Data collection and storage

The data belongs to the educational institution, and Microsoft only collects the data and stores it. Microsoft personnel cannot access the data or see it, except as allowed by compliance in an audited way to maintain the service, such as data recovery.

The data is stored in Education Insights. By default, Education Insights is turned on. When you opt out, we delete all the data collected for Reflect. Turn Education Insights back on, and we start collecting data from the time it's re-enabled.

In the IT Admin Guide to Education Insights, you can read how Education Insights works (including storage locations) and how to turn Education Insights off or on when you want to delete the data or enable the service.

Data is collected from student in Reflect, though guest data isn't collected. If a student is defined as a guest, their data is not collected.

Enable Reflect

If you manage the app setup policy for your institution, ensure that Reflect is allowed in your tenant. You can also add Reflect to the relevant class teams from the Teams admin center.

To enable a user to install and interact with any app, you must allow the app at the org level on the Manage apps page and the app permission policy assigned to the user.

If you have previously defined that each app needs to be allowed, please go to the Manage apps page and 'allow' Reflect. When you block an app, the app doesn't appear in Teams for any users in your organization.

Note

To have access to the Reflect app, you will need an A1, A3, or A5 license for Microsoft 365.

Where do educators find Reflect?

Reflect is available by default in any Class or Staff team. To access the app, navigate to your desired team, then select the Reflect tab.

Tip

For more details, visit Reflect support page. This page provides guidelines for both educators and students and helps with how to create their first Reflect check-in.