Promoting Preservice Teacher Reflection By Collaborative Learning

This study mainly discussed the content and levels of preservice teacher reflection by organizing five English preservice teachers to discuss each other’s lesson plan, watch each other’s class video, and give their suggestions together. And the role of collaborative learning used in this study was discussed. All those preservice teachers had the internship experience for three months in high schools of Beijing. During their internship, they all had the chance to have at least one class, and their classes would be videoed during the class. This study wanted to answer three questions:1. Whether preservice teachers demonstrated evidence of reflective thinking throughout the field practice and if so, what are the types of reflective thinking indicators?2. Whether there was an increase in the number of high-level reflective indicators over time?3. What was the role of community, as perceived by participates in developing reflective skills? Some methods of qualitative research would be used in this study. By collecting data through interviews, analyzing data carefully, we got the results that preservice teachers did demonstrate evidence of reflective thinking including low-levels and high-levels. And after getting advice from group members and knowing the class effects from others’opinion, the preservice teachers had a deeper reflection about their teaching and their level of reflection become higher. Through later questionnaire, we found that most preservice teachers agreed with the idea that collaborative learning did play an important role in promoting their reflection and they even gave some examples that the collaborative learning benefitted them a lot.