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Date Posted: 17:24:30 04/10/07 Tue
Author: Cristiane Tinôco
Subject: Re: Task One Group Eight - Cristiane
In reply to: Adriana 's message, "Task One Group Eight" on 06:11:16 04/08/07 Sun

The importance of Reflective Teaching theories
Although Reflective Practice has become a dominant paradigm in ESL teacher education programs all over the world, not much of its application has been observed in teaching practice itself. The concept of Reflective Teaching is not clearly defined and a plethora of different approaches, with sometimes confusing meanings have been pushed into teacher education programs. Nevertheless, all the approaches shed light on the issue of teacher development and could initiate a process of improvement inside ESL and other pedagogical processes. After studying them, most teachers realize the importance of reflection, but when it comes to classrooms and school routines, there is no time and no schedule to turn it into reality.
For the time being, we are going to base our discussion on the definitions given by Pennington (1992) and Richards (1990). Pennington defines Reflective Teaching as “deliberating on experience, and that of mirroring experience.” In a more recent article, Pennington (1995) defined teacher development as “a metastable system of context-interactive change involving a continual cycle of innovative behavior and critical reflection. Richards (1990) sees reflection as a key component of teacher development. He says that self inquiry and critical thinking can “help teachers move from a level where they may be guided largely by impulse, intuition, or routine, to a level where their actions are guided by reflection and critical thinking.” His concept of critical reflection encompasses “an activity or a process in which experience is recalled, considered, and evaluated, usually in relation to a broader purpose. It is a response to a past experience and involves conscious recall and examination of the experience as a basis for evaluation and decision making and as a source for planning and action”.
Different approaches to Reflective Teaching have focused on different strategies which lead to critical thinking, e.g., Reflection-in-action (dealing with on the spot professional problems as they occur); Reflection-on-action, (teacher gives reasons for his/her behavior/actions after class); Reflection-for-action (proactive thinking in order to guide future action) and Action Research (self-reflective enquiry by participants in social settings to improve practice). (1) Even though they are based upon different learning and teaching theories, they are all attempts to develop teaching skills, and avoid impulse and routine behaviors already proved inefficient.
One of the greatest challenges of teacher education programs is to put these definitions into practice. We all know that teacher’s change and development require an awareness of a need to change. Considering this statement we must argue the validness and even the possibility of “teaching” how to be reflective. How can we “teach” someone to change, to innovate and to be critical? Is it possible?
Recent research has proved it is. If English as a second or foreign language is to become recognized as a professional body, then teachers need to be able to explain their judgments and actions in their classrooms with reasoned argument. Ways of achieving this level of reason include reflection on teaching experiences and incorporation of evidence from relevant scholarship into teaching routines, which can lead to growth and development. Teaching how to be reflective is not only possible, but almost indispensable, and it should be part of the initial courses in worldwide teaching programs, once it is easier to foment this ability before some behaviors become fossilized routines.
The reality we can observe inside a language school is not at all congruent with the theories presented in this paper. In short, teachers are trained to follow the books, asked not to question the method, and prevented from meeting other teachers for pedagogical discussions. Some schools forbid their teachers to take the books home in order to avoid plagiarism. Furthermore, teachers do not participate in the curriculum building process, and in some cases schools hire scholars who are not familiar with the context to write the syllabus for them. Even though teachers are exposed to its theory in seminars and other meetings, Reflective Teaching remains part of discourse, far away from practice.

(1) Of course those simple explanations do not account for the deep contents of the approaches, but they are rather an attempt to introduce the main idea of each one.

Bibliography:
Pennington, M. 1992. Reflecting on teaching and learning: A development focus for the second language classroom. In Perspectives on Second Language Classroom Teacher Education. eds. J. Flowerdew, M. Brock, and S. Hsia. Kowloon: City Polythenic of Hong Kong
_______. 1995. The teacher change cycle. TESOL Quartely, 29, 4, pp.705 – 731
Richards, J. 1990. Beyond training: Aproaches to teacher education in language teaching. Language Teacher, 14, 2, pp 3- 8

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  • Re: Task One Group Eight -- Andréa de Jesus, 16:56:34 04/11/07 Wed
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