One teacher's development as a reflective practitioner
Mark Wyatt khalifa.academia.edu
235 One Teacher&#39;s Development as a Reflective Practitioner Mark Wyatt University of Leeds, UK Bio Data: Mark Wyatt worked as a Regional Tutor on the University of Leeds BA (TESOL) Project in Oman between 2002 and 2008, and is co-editor (with John
A Teacher is said to be a candle that burns itself to light up the life of others. Reflective practice thoughtfully considering one’s own experiences in applying knowledge to practice while being coached by professional in the discipline (Schon, 1996)[1]. Reflection refers to an activity or process in which an experience is recalled, considered, and evaluated, usually in relation to a broader purpose. It is a response to past experience and involves conscious recall and examination of the experience as a basis for evaluation and decision-making and as a source for planning and action. (Richard 1990)[2].The paper focuses on the reflective thinking of the school teachers ofCoochbehar districtof state West Bengal in India. The investigator had adopted descriptive survey methods and through questionnaire data has been collected from 150 different levels of school teachers. The study revealed that the teacher’s reflective levels of thinking were different. It had been also found that the...

When an educational establishment decides to promote reflective practice in its midst and expects all stakeholders (teachers, students, and administrators) to become reflective practitioners and advocates, there ought to be a firm understanding of the meaning of the term reflection and of the concept of reflective practice. This research paper will address all relevant issues concerning the practice of reflection, highlighting the primacy of professional development as a reliable and robust link between theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. The paper will also explore the current research with regard to reflective practice. A comprehensive literature review of the practice within the educational field will be alluded to. Best approaches to integrate relevant strategies and to address issues emanating from the practice will also be included. Finally, recommendations for future development and a synthesis of the various elements needed for efficient reflective practice will be provided.

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.

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.

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).

This qualitative telling case study was situated within a broader project, which explored how the research participants modified their teaching after having completed their master’s program. We investigated reflective stance of a teacher-practitioner who was a graduate of a Master’s Literacy Specialist program, which promoted reflective teaching practices using videos of students’ own teaching. The research questions were: (1) How does the participant demonstrate his use of a reflective stance with regard to teaching practices? (2) What are the modifications in teaching practices that were made by the participant after the reflective video pedagogy course used in his graduate practicum? (3) What other elements of his graduate program does the participant describe as being important in his development as a reflective practitioner? (4) Which of these elements does he choose to employ in his classroom? Primary data sources included: classroom observations, participant interviews, and s...