Reframing Teaching On The Journey Of Reflection And Inquiry

A person's decision to become a teacher must not only be based on the successful acquisition of technical skills and professional knowledge, but also on the conscious development of a refined sense of self. Especially as for novice teachers, engaging in teaching is a socializing course and a phase in which they merge into the school, professional framework and social structure. This phase is crucial to novice teachers' future development, for it might evolve into two scenes: some teachers enter the capability-establishing stage, manifest the openness and vigour, and are more proficient in teaching. Other teachers become complacent and conservative, lack of enthusiasm. Therefore, the researcher steps into the site, venturing to explore how a novice teacher adapts to teaching and school culture, what conflicts she encounters and how she achieves her growth on the journey of reflective inquiry and refraining teaching. My research is to trace to the source along the journey of inquiry, aiming at describing and explaining novice teachers' growth, their living conditions and the effects of their practice on teaching. This sort of description and explanation enables the researcher to step into teacher's life world to find and construct a kind of exploration, of which the story is to uncover the mysterious veils and present educational soul. This category of exploration is a kind of humanistic care for teachers themselves, a vivid explanation for educators and a sensible reminder for education policy-makers.This study, which adopts the increasingly glamorous qualitative research methodology, selects a novice teacher (Linda) in a high school as my research case to inquire into her life and teaching, and to understand her growth experiences by way of on-the-spot observations, interview and other ways of data collection. The research methods adopted in the study include narrative inquiry, case-study method and observation, etc. The data collected from a period of about 8 months comprise class records, teacher's summary, teacher's reflective journals, students' e-mail letters, students' evaluations on the teacher, interviews, textbooks, and so on.