Page 230 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

The Impact of Pre-service Teachers’ Reflection

Why Reflection in Teacher Education Programs?

In teacher education programs, there needs to be a shift from an apprenticeship to a reflective practice
model (Calderhead, 1989). Pre-service teachers have the capacity to analyze and evaluate their practices;
therefore, teacher education programs should emphasize not only the technical parts of teaching but also
the relationship between theory and practice, and the importance of reflecting upon what they practice.
How to reflect must be one of the required parts of the teacher educators programs; pre-service teachers
need to learn to initiate new ways of thinking and reflecting because they are only provided with the
theories and principles at their teacher educator programs.
When you think of a pre-service teacher in his/her first years of education, they lack the necessary
skills to analyse and evaluate their own practice, they do not even know how to word their experiences
or think about situations related with their teaching.
According to Richert (1992), pre-service teachers must actively engage in the process of reflection
to make it become a habit in their profession. Richert also claims that reflection of their practices gives
teachers the opportunity to construct knowledge about teaching and their profession. The process of
reflection should not be a process for pre-service teachers only; rather, both pre-service and in-service
teachers need to engage in it in order to learn from their experiences.
Reflection or reflective teaching is a central part of the teacher/learning process. Without reflec-
tion or reflective teaching, one can risk of relying on routinized teaching and problems in professional
development. Mewborn (1999) states that teacher education programs should give opportunities to
pre-service teachers to learn how to reflect on their personal experiences and learn how to make use
of those experiences and reflections for their future teachings. It is believed that if pre-service teachers
learn how to reflect on their teaching during their practice teaching process and continue doing so during
the in-service years (Loughran, 2007). This will end up improving teaching, and professional develop-
ment. Likewise, teacher education programs should focus on the reason why teachers employ certain
instructional strategies and on how they can achieve effective teaching with professional development;
that is why pre-service teachers are highly encouraged to be involved in reflective practice not only to
achieve a better state of professional development but also to have a better and more positive effect on
their students through their teaching.
Although several studies attempted to find out the effect of reflection and reflective practice of pre-
service teachers in teacher education, the overwhelming majority of these studies have been qualitative
in design, focusing on a small number of cases (Fairbanks and Meritt, 1998; McDraw, et.al., 2004; Frid
and Reid, 2005; Pedro, 2005; Rodman, 2010; Robichaux and Guarino, 2012).
Teacher educators must start teaching about reflection, its importance, and how to reflect on actions
before the practice teaching experiences begin. For a pre-service teacher to get used to reflecting, they
need time and a lot of practice. Frid and Reid (2002) proposed that long before novice teachers start their
actual teaching in their own classrooms, their teacher educators should provide them with controlled
situations which will help them to improve the ability to reflect on classroom practice and teaching.
Through this, educators will raise awareness in pre-service teachers of the different choices and teaching
behaviours observed in them through reflection and in this way they can integrate their observations
made through reflections into their future teaching.
McDraw, et al. (2004) worked with four undergraduate special education majors to observe the devel-
opment of a personal philosophy of education as well as the effectiveness of reflection and its influence

211