DEAR teachers and students, dear principals and counselors, as the new school year begins, let us reflect. Let us reflect on our reflections about reflecting.

Let us reflect on the triumph of jargon and buzzwords in the education field. Let us reflect on how a common-sense concept gets glorified as if it were brilliant innovation. Let us reflect on how badly educators need their own equivalent of “Dilbert” or “The Office” to puncture certain overly inflated rhetorical and theoretical bubbles.

To back up for the uninitiated, “reflection” as both word and action may be the trendiest trend in all of education. Education students learn how to be reflective teachers in education school. Then, in their own classrooms, they ask their students to write reflections on what they have read. After class, the teachers do reflections on their own lessons. Principals, administrators, other staff members — all are increasingly urged or even required to engage in reflection.

And what, a lay person might well ask, does reflection mean? A reasonable definition would be “thinking about what you’re doing,” as David F. Labaree, a professor of education at Stanford University, puts it with welcome and all-too-rare clarity. It means pausing to take stock in a journal of how you felt about the short story you just read or figuring out why the lesson you just taught faltered halfway through.

Ah, but to express the notion of reflection so directly is to unclothe the emperor, to remove the wrappings of classicism, intellectual depth, even spirituality from it. The exponents of reflection like to trace its lineage to Descartes, Rousseau, Tolstoy and John Dewey.

To which Lynn Fendler, an education professor at Michigan State University, has replied in an article in Educational Researcher magazine that these days the term reflection is “treacle” with a “confusing morass of meanings.”

As Professor Fendler points out, Dewey viewed “reflective thinking” in such classic works as “How We Think,” as a “triumph of reason and science over instinct and impulse.” Seventy years later, reflection has largely become the very thing Dewey wanted to rebel against — the consecration of emotion and feeling.

By making every teacher and student the unchallenged arbiter of his or her own achievement, reflection dovetails neatly with progressive education’s preference for process over content and with the confessional, therapeutic strain of American culture.

“ ‘Reflection’ is a loosey-goosey term that sounds deep enough to be acceptable for the image that ed schools want to convey,” said Sandra Stotsky, an education consultant who formerly served as deputy education commissioner in Massachusetts. “It’s a substitute for real good, useful, hard words that used to be prevalent in talking about teacher’s work — critique, evaluation, analysis,” she said. “ ‘Evaluation’ sounds like there are actually some criteria involved. Whereas if you ‘reflect,’ it sounds psychologically deep and relativistic.”

Professor Labaree, author of “The Trouble With Ed Schools,” made a similar point: “Reflection has got this scientific side — let’s step back from automatic behavior and apply theory and facts to it — but it also captures this kind of romantic, naturalistic side of progressivism. That if you get in touch with who you really are, deep inside, you’ll become a more effective teacher. Those two things actually don’t go together.”

While the reflection crowd may trace the movement’s roots to the Enlightenment, the bonanza really began much more recently. The credit (or blame) belongs to a professor and management consultant, Donald Schön. In his 1983 book “The Reflective Practitioner” and the 1987 sequel “Educating the Reflective Practitioner,” Professor Schön extolled what he called “reflection-in-action” or “knowledge-in-action” as a form of “teaching artistry.”

Instead of studying the research on effective instruction and enacting those precepts in the classroom, Professor Schön argued, teachers should be “thinking about what they’re doing” and “conducting an action experiment on the spot.”

As for the students, he said, “They must plunge into the doing and try to educate themselves.”

When Professor Schön died in 1997, his impact was being broadly felt, and it has only expanded since then. On one Internet search engine, for instance, the terms “reflection” and “teaching” turned up about 600 times in news articles and broadcasts in 1990 and nearly 4,600 times in 2005. When Professor Fendler of Michigan State surveyed the scholarly literature on reflection, 67 of the 84 works she cited had been published since 1990.

The 2006 conventions of the American Educational Research Association and the National Council of Teachers of English include such panels as “Reflections on and Implications of Research on Adolescents’ Explorations With Everyday Texts,” “Reflections on the Work Lives of Administrators,” “Utilizing Collaboration and Reflection to Develop the Compleat Composition Student” and “Promoting Self-Reflective and Effective Student Writers.”

THE more lucid advocates of reflection make the case that it helps students face, understand and correct flaws in their writing. In the form of journals or notebooks, reflection also affords students the chance to respond to works they have read and, in the process, to feel some sense of capability as writers. The better education courses have aspiring teachers reflect while watching videos of themselves delivering lessons.

But such concrete applications often feel lost amid the numbing invocations of reflection. Martin Kozloff, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and an expert on education jargon, groups “reflection” with such other examples of “fashionable folderol” as “developmentally appropriate practices,” “brain-based instruction,” “higher-order thinking” and “learning styles.”

Deborah Meier, one of the nation’s leading progressive educators, finds reflection’s vogue particularly interesting now, at a time that standardized tests are the dominant measure of academic success. It is a case of lingo as palliative.

“Why is the word ‘empowerment’ in proliferation when we’re actually taking more power away from teachers?” she said. “Maybe we’re talking so much about reflection because we have no time to reflect at all.”

E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com