Reflective Practice For Professional Development

Counteracting with the traditional top-down approaches, reflective practice is believed to represent a more humanistic approach to teacher education that facilitates self-awareness and the teacher's development of professional identity. Although reflective practice has already made incursions into the Chinese pre-service teacher education programs for over the last year, research in the field still belongs to an initial stage and many calls have been made to provide contextualized accounts. This study aims to provide contextualized descriptions and understandings of pre-service teachers'reflective practice for professional development during the teaching practicum. It is concerned with the analysis of student teachers'reflections in terms of content and levels and seeks to provide insightful information to teacher educators in relation to pre-service teacher education and the implementation of a reflective approach in a Chinese practicum program. The nine Chinese student teachers who volunteered to participate in this study were engaged in a systematic process of reflection during the10weeks of their teaching practicum. Three main instruments were employed to encourage and collect student teachers'reflections:(1) a series of predesigned reflection tasks to be completed periodically,(2) a reflective journal, and (3) weekly open interviews and conversations. Data was triangulated into three main categories related to student teachers'content of reflection (i.e. student teachers'reflections from their role of student teachers, teachers, and reflective practitioners). In terms of contents of reflection, the study revealed that the topics of reflection within these perspectives were varied and echoed Korthagen's (2004) onion model describing the levels on which reflection can take place. In terms of levels of reflection, it showed that student teachers could achieve different levels from descriptive to critical. Their reflections also unveiled a series of contextualized issues regarding the teaching practicum program and the implementation of reflective practice in it. Such issues were discussed and several recommendations were made for pre-service teacher educators to envision further implementations of reflection for professional development in the teaching practicum.