Understanding the reflective process through self-study : a teacher educator's journey towards continuous professional development

Abstract

An increasingly important part of engaging in professional behaviour is the ability of both teachers and teacher educators to make informed decisions emerging from reflection and analysis of professional practice (Calderhead 1989; Livingston 2012). As a result, teacher education institutions have in the past three decades increasingly attempted to support pre-service teachers' development into reflective professionals as a preparation for increasingly complex and ever-changing classroom scenarios (Toom, Husu, and Patrikainen 2015; Mena-Marcos, Garcia-Rodriguez, and Tillema 2013; Hatton and Smith 1995). Subsequently, rather than being presented with a set of skills that needed to be mastered, the focus started shifting towards how teachers learn about teaching and ultimately how teachers learn about their own and their students' learning (Calderhead 1987). Therefore, teachers' cognitive processes before, during, and after teaching assumed increasing importance in understanding teachers' professional development as part of their daily lives. Such theoretical underpinning, in parallel with my difficult experiences of trying to support pre-service teachers' development into reflective professionals, led me to ask: "How can teacher educators help pre-service teachers become reflective? What is the best way to do so?" Unfortunately, there is no clear answer to these questions, as there is a void in research efforts that might answer teacher educators' questions on how best to support pre-service teachers' development of reflection (Pellicone and Raison 2009; Mena-Marcos, Sanchez, and Tillema 2011; Mena-Marcos, Garcia-Rodriguez, and Tillema 2013). This is paradoxical, considering that teacher educators have promoted themselves as proponents of reflection (Mena-Marcos, Garcia-Rodriguez, and Tillema 2013; Stapleton 2011). Considering my role as a teacher educator trying to support pre-service teachers' reflective development, I chose to position this study within a socio-constructivist framework. My professional interaction, with my students, and interactions between students themselves, were my main opportunities to promote reflective engagement, especially when considering that social interaction is the medium by which knowledge is constructed. According to Vygotsky (1978), such social interaction provides the individual with assistance from others that promotes the learning of a task that might be rather difficult to achieve alone. This chapter therefore aims at aiding the reader to understand the reflective process undertaken by a teacher educator, and how this has an impact on the teacher educator's professional development with the aim of improved professional practice that can have a positive impact on pre-service teachers' learning.