Reflective practice in FSL teacher education programs: exploring thinking, feeling and learning (original) (raw)
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Teacher as a Reflective Practitioner: Nurturing Teacher’s Character
Book Chapter , 2022
To have a voice means to be reflexive and reflexivity is a social scientific variety of self-consciousness (Delamont, 1992). Reflection is important, and some might acknowledge that they do not really know how to get the best from it. According to Ghaye (2011), reflective practices help us understand the links between what we do and how we might improve our effectiveness. Reflective practices help people to understand the significance of work, and provide new insights for developing this work. They also help us understand the links between feeling, thinking and doing -how we feel affects how we think- (ibid, 2011). This paper will try to help teachers to develop their understanding and skills of learning through reflection. It is hoped that this work can help teachers to explore the power and potency of reflecting on strengths and weaknesses, make sense of teaching and be the best that they can be.
One teacher’s development as a reflective practitioner
Asian EFL Journal, 2010
Using qualitative case study methodology, this article explores a language teacher’s development as a reflective practitioner, while she was engaged on a three-year in-service BA (TESOL) programme in the Middle East. Data gained from observations and interviews reveal evidence of growth in her reflective qualities, skills and capacity to reflect critically, as she learned to solve teaching problems, drawing on public as well as personal theories. The constructivist nature of the BA (TESOL) programme concerned was integral to her development, as was a warm, supportive environment in the school she taught in. Interview data that uncovered early career experiences emphasises the need for pre-service courses to prepare teachers thoroughly for the challenges they face.
Reflection is increasingly used as a means to support teacher professional development, and ultimately to support teachers' efforts to improve the persistent underachievement of minority students. In this article, we identify the limits of the traditional view of reflection, argue that reflection is an artifact and a practice embedded in a larger process, namely teacher learning, and outline basic notions of a culturalhistorical vision of learning as praxis in which reflection is embedded. Further, we argue that a new vision of critical, situated reflection must include both technical and political content and be based on a dialogic approach.
This small-scale case study conducted in Trabzon, Turkey, aimed at uncovering the attitude of a tertiary-level novice teacher towards reflective practice in English as a foreign-language setting. The data were derived from the pre- and post-study interviews with the novice teacher, her reflective papers on her audio-recorded lessons, her classroom observation notes about the experienced teacher and the informal researcher observations. The researchers’ role was to design the process, familiarise the teacher with the focus of reflection, conduct the interviews, analyse and interpret the reflective papers of the teacher. The results show that reflective practice may be challenging in terms of emotions for a novice teacher as it may be hard to confront an outsider’s view. The results point to beneficial impact of the self-initiated reflection on the way to teachers’ continuous professional development.
A critical reflection on reflective teaching: The food for thought for teacher education
Reflective teaching as the self-inquiry and evaluation of teacher performance has turned to be a buzzword in language teaching. In spite of the fact that theoretical foundations and perspectives of reflective teaching have been sufficiently investigated, some practical considerations, such as the role of the language teacher and learnersùnique personalities, as well as socio-cultural effects, have received scant attention in the literature. This paper is an attempt to study those issues and the conditions required to pave the way for better understanding and applying reflective teaching so that it can lead to more practical changes in the teaching process.
At the top of every syllabus: Examining and becoming (critical) reflective practitioners
In this paper, we explore what it means to become a reflective practitioner in the field of teacher preparation. We are two new teacher educators working at different universities in the Northeast United States. One is a mid-sized private university in an urban area, the other a mid-sized public university in a rural area. In our positions, we prepare, teach, and supervise undergraduate and graduate students as they work to complete state certification requirements to teach in early childhood and elementary classrooms. Both of our programs utilize (at least nominally) a reflective practitioner model for teacher preparation. Over the course of one semester, we engaged in the dual-level process of collaboratively examining what it means to become critical reflective practitioners (Brookfield, 1998; Larrivee, 2000; LaBoskey, 2004) while also preparing social justice oriented pre-service teachers. The reflective practitioner model originated with John Dewey (1933), who described reflective thinking as a process that involves experiencing and questioning very practical problems during learning. This framework was formalized for the field of teacher education by Donald Schön who defined reflective practice as the continuous and cyclical process of examining both one's own actions and the context and values which influence those practices (1983, 1987). The reflective practitioner, according to Schön, aims to connect theory with practice, using inquiry to explore the challenges a teacher faces when working with students in the classroom. Over the past thirty years, Schön's work has become widely adopted by teacher education programs across the United States (Loughran, 2002; Richert, 1990; Valli, 1993; Zeichner, 1987). This " reflective teaching movement " emerged as a way for programs to answer the call for teachers to become more adept at understanding their students' complex social, cultural and political learning contexts (Liu, 2015, p. 137). But, for many teacher preparation programs, the grounding concept behind reflective practice has become disjointed with the practice of preparing teachers, with multiple, unclear definitions of how to engage in reflective practice (Zeichner & Liu, 2010).
The Reflective Practitioner and the Curriculum of Teacher Education
Journal of Education for Teaching, 1991
In this paper three different meanings ascribed to reflective teaching are examined. The first, Cruikshank's Reflective Teaching Model, sees reflective teaching as the ability to analyze one's own teaching practices. Schon's "Reflection in Action," on the other hand, argues that the professional practitioner is one who can think while acting and thus respond to the uncertainty, uniqueness, and conflict involved in the situations in which professionals practice. The third perspective toward reflective teacher education, the work of Zeichner, posits three levels of reflection: technical elements, situational and institutional contexts, and moral and ethical issues. The three models are described and compared, with references to other studies and theories on reflection. Teaching strategies intended to facilitate the development of reflection are discussed. These strategies are seen as ways to promote critical inquiry among preservice teachers. (JD)