Abstract
Teachers use different tools and techniques to gain an understanding of the context in which the class is held in order to resolve problems through the process of reflection. In reflective practice, teachers observe their students’ reactions and the results of using a particular theory or technique in class and gather all their experiences in order to adapt or modify the theory chosen. In the process of reflection, teachers must relate teaching theory to teaching practice and observe the students’ responses regarding the findings of an appropriate theory or a technique. This paper focuses on the importance of reflective teaching and aims to introduce different perspectives involved in this issue.
Key Words: reflective teaching, reflective teacher, reflective practice, sociocultural perspective
Introduction
Reflective practice was introduced in the late nineteenth century by Dewey,followed by other prominent scholars such as Schӧn, Kolb, and Gibbs (Rushton & Suter, 2012).As Dewey (1933) argued, a reflective process starts with a perceived conflict in a context, continues with the interpretation of classroom activities and ends in making a decision regarding removing the problem.Gore and Zeichner (1991) proposed that reflection is thinking about an action in the context; therefore, teaching as a reflective practice comprises two processes:
1. Self-observation: in this process, teachers must consider their students’ needs, goals, interests, habits, lessons, and the time of the class.
2. Self-evaluation: teachers make a decision about their classes. According to Nikolov (2015), self-evaluation is the result of self and peer correction and helps learners to become more reflective in the learning process. In this process both teachers and learners are responsible. Learners evaluate themselves and their peers, and teachers evaluate everyone in the context. They can all gather together and discuss their reflections and the critical comments from the evaluation exercise. In this way, teachers can decide on the classroom context.
Therefore, reflective teachers are those who promote reflection as an essential tool in their classrooms and reflective practice is an interactive process between a teacher and students. It is not only about making the teacher a better educator, but it is also about making the students aware of their learning processes.Teachers engage in a continuous cycle of self-observation and self-evaluation for knowing their own reactions to classroom situations. In reflective teaching, according to Cunningham (2001 as cited in Juhary, 2014, p.141),observing and refining teaching practices on an ongoing process is a vital goal. This goal can help teachers to recover their teaching, and adopt suitable strategies to teach in a particular situation.
Characteristics of Reflective Teaching
The ability to reflect upon practice is a systematic way which is considered a requirement of professional practice. Some characteristics of reflective teaching are as follows:
- It is a combination of skills and enquiries with attitudes of responsibility and open-mindedness and a cyclical process in which teachers revise their works.
- It is based on self-reflection and teachersʼ judgment of educational activities.
- Open-mindedness is willingness to listen to more than one side of an issue and to give attention to alternative options.
- According to McKay (2007), three factors contribute to reflective practice:
1.Teachers’ experiences: teachers spend many hours in their classrooms; thus they gain many experiences about the role of students, lessons, and curriculum in the context. Reflective teachers draw on these beliefs when they make decisions about what to do in their own classrooms.
2. Sufficient knowledge: Teachers must have sufficient knowledge about students’ needs in different classroom situations, learning progress and the content they want to teach, course management, the role of interaction, and the goals of the course. Reflective teachers often base their choices on what they have learned in their teacher training.
3. Individual values: a teacher has specific educational, political, moral, and social values based on his/her experiences. These values can affect the choices a teacher makes in his/her teaching practices.
Characteristics of Reflective Teachers in Contrast with Non-Reflective Teachers
Teachers should find the new ways of teaching and avoid routine behaviors through reflective practices. Therefore, it is necessary to specify the distinctions between reflective teachers and non-reflective teachers.Table 1 shows the distinctions between the two types of teachers:
Values and Importance of Reflective Teaching
Reflective teaching has a central position in professional education and teachers’ experiences signify its role in effective teaching. Thus, three values should be considered regarding the importance of reflective teaching:
- The process of reflective teaching relates to the concept of development, education, and training. By these concepts, we can understand that some skills, instruments, and strategies can be taught to enable teachers to become reflective (Mann, 2005).
- Reflective teaching is the method to deal with classroom barriers. In this process, teachers should not be passive in classroom situations; they should have an active role as an innovator in the classroom (Dewey, 1993).
- Teachers can overcome doubts and fears to critically assess their practice and make a meaningful change (Farrell, 2008).
Sociocultural Learning Perspective and Reflective Practice
Sociocultural learning perspective is one of the most significant perspectives on professional development and learning which has relevance to the process of reflective practice. This perspective emphasizes the social nature and social interactions. The central view of this notion is that learners create their own understanding and knowledge by making connections, building their concepts, and mental schemata through collaborative meaning-making. It tries to increase our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of reflective practice (Mann & Walsh, 2017). There is a relationship between reflective practice and dynamic assessment which results from the collective actions of students and teachers together in the classroom. Dynamic process is the view of coming to know and knowing in practice as a process which is distributed across participants rather than individuals. Knowing in practice is also a constructive process from which those involved remember the experience of participation and form the basis of participants’ subjective knowledge in practice. Therefore social practice is the outcome of a dynamic process which relates to reflections of practitioners (Kelly, 2011). Shokouhi, Moghimi, and Hosseinzadeh(2015) indicated that reflective practice is a kind of framework for sociocultural theory and it has great advantages over the other frameworks in which reflective practice is treated as an individualistic and an introspective process.
The Sample Questionnaire for Reflective Teaching
We suggest teachers to use the following questionnaire with a Likert scale for estimating their reflective practice. This questionnaire consists of 33 items where respondents are asked to circle the number that describes the way they think about their teaching practice on a scale of ...1 to 5. (1) strongly agree, (2) disagree with reservations, (3) you are neutral about the statement, (4) agree with reservations, (5) indicating that you strongly agree. This questionnaire is adapted from Choy and Oo (2012) that is published in “International Journal of Instruction”.The topics of the questionnaire were created based on research by Hamilton (2005) on the development of reflective thinking.The statements cover three major areas of development; that is, ability to self-express, awareness of how one learns, and developing lifelong learning skills.Choy and Oo (2012) added another area, the”influence of belief about self and self-efficacy” (p.173).We have broken down the indicators into sub-sections. The scoring of the questionnaire is calculated by adding the scores that a teacher has gained from each question.
• Scores between 33 up to 77 mean that a teacher seldom reflects on his or her practices and would likely just follow orders so s/he is an introductory reflective teacher.
• Scores between 77 up to 121 mean that a teacher sometimes reflects on his or her teaching practices but not on an in-depth level so s/he is an intermediate reflective teacher.
• Scores between 121 up to 165 mean that a teacher reflects deeply on his or her practices and is constantly making efforts to improve them so s/he is an advanced reflective teacher.
Conclusion
Reflective teaching poses the question, ‘who reflects on what?’. It is the rethinking of teachers over what they have done in a classroom situation. They analyze what they have taught and how they can step up what they have done for a better learning outcome. Reflective teaching is learning more about what a teacher has done through reflecting on it. In the practice of reflectivity, the teachers can improve their effectiveness in their classes. However, reflectivity is not possible on the side of a teacher unless s/he possesses some characteristics.
A characteristic that distinguishes a reflective teacher from a non-reflective one is the analysis a teacher does over what has been done in the classroom. A reflective teacher considers the probable diary or report of the activities done in the classroom to find the weaknesses and attempts to change them into strengths. Through doing this, a teacher does not teach in the same way again. In this process, one crucial point a teacher notices and keeps in mind is that not all classes are the same. As people are distinct, the atmospheres where they attend are also different, too. So what might apply in one class might not be practicable in another. A reflective teacher constantly seeks feedback from different sources. These references can include other teachers, managers and administrators, parents, and most importantly classroom students. Finally yet importantly, a reflective teacher knows well that teaching is not an easy job to be done solo. There are factors other than the teacher him/herself that influence the efficiency of whatever is practiced in the class. Reflective teaching is a collection of factors that optimize a teacher’s efficiency, and that is what a reflective teacher knows well.
References
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