Promoting Teacher Reflection in Second Language Education

A Framework for TESOL Professionals

Thomas S. C. Farrell

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317687337
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Filología
• Thema: Inglés

Taking the concept and the practice of reflective teaching forward, this book introduces a well-structured, flexible framework for use by teachers at all levels of development, from pre-service to novice to the most experienced. The framework outlines five levels of reflective practice—Philosophy; Principles; Theory-of-Practice; Practice; Beyond Practice—and provides specific techniques for teachers to implement each level of reflection in their work. Designed to allow readers to take either a deductive approach, moving from theory-into-practice, or an inductive approach where they start from a practice-into-theory position, the framework can be used by teachers alone, in pairs, or in a group.

1
Getting into Reflective Practice

Introduction

One of the buzzwords in the field of education over the past 20 years or so that has taken hold and become part of nearly every description of teacher education or development programs is “reflection” or “reflective practice.” If we look back further we can see that these terms can be traced to the work of the great American educator John Dewey in the 1930s, and then much later, and after a lull of sorts, again by his student Donald Schön in the early 1980s. I will say up front that these two scholars have influenced much of my work on reflective practice over the past 35 years or so as will be evident when you read this introduction and the chapters that follow in this book. This introductory chapter sets the scene for the remainder of the book and shows how I got into the area of reflective practice and how the framework that I present in the book developed from more than 35 years of my work on the concept of reflective practice.

Getting into Reflective Practice

Reflective practice entered my professional life very early and stealthily, and of course at the time I was not familiar with the term. One morning in 1977 as a teacher-learner on my teaching practice assignment in a high school in Dublin, Ireland I was teaching a business English class to junior high school students and in my fourth week or so during one class a student suddenly shouted out: “Teacher you are stupid!” I was astonished as I had no idea at that moment how to respond. Although I was in shock for a few moments, I remember that I said to the boy that he could and should not say this to me, his teacher or any teacher, and that he should write a letter of apology to me before I would let him back to my class. I then asked him to leave for the remainder of that lesson. Just before class on the following day he handed me a letter which he said he wrote as an apology. In that letter (which I still have today) he gave the following reason for saying what he had the previous day: “Teacher, I called you stupid because you were stupid because you gave us the same homework the day before and that is why you are stupid.”

When I read that note I realized that he was correct as I had mistakenly given the class the same homework in the previous class. I also realized that even though we may think that our students may not be listening to their teachers, in fact, they are. Unfortunately, the student who made the statement was actually deemed a “problem” student by his regular teachers, in that he was always at the center of any class activity that the teachers had difficulty controlling; however, I always had a good relationship with him, probably because he reminded me of when I was a student at his age. I never forgot this “critical incident” and now after many years working within the topic of reflective practice, I realize it was my first introduction to Schön’s (1983) reflection-in-action (my immediate response to the student’s statement) and reflecting-on-action (my later responses). Over the years I have had many more occasions where I have experienced both reflection-inaction moments and reflection-on-action examples in different classrooms, contexts, and countries but it was that early classroom example that has stayed with me for many years although I had no real understanding of its true meaning until I began to read Schön’s (1983) seminal work on reflective practice.

About this time too in my own professional life (I was teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) in a university in Seoul, South Korea) I became very interested in my own teaching and I remember one day in a class wondering what was really happening during my lessons and how was it possible to know. Thus I became more and more interested in reflecting on what I was doing, how and why I was doing it, and so I began to read widely about how I could explore my own practice. I also decided to reflect formally and entered a doctoral program of which I have written about recently (Farrell, 2013). During my PhD studies I was again drawn to the whole concept of reflective practice and began to formalize my explorations of this fascinating concept and indeed have since spent my whole professional career investigating this concept of reflective practice within second language education. Now of course the term has become very popular (and almost mandatory) in many pre-service teacher education programs and in-service professional development programs worldwide. It seems that everyone has jumped on the bandwagon of reflective practice, and as Tabachnick and Zeichner (2002: 13) have noted, “there is not a single teacher educator who would say that he or she is not concerned about preparing teachers who are reflective.”

However, I hope the contents of this book show that reflective practice is not another bandwagon term within the field of second language education even though some have said that the concept has lost some of its sharpness over these years. Yes, most teacher educators believe that some form of reflection is desirable, but they still do not agree on its definition or what it means to be “reflective.” Indeed, Tabachnick and Zeichner (2002: 13–14) have noted, “the criteria that have been attached to reflective practice are so diverse” that we do not know what it is teachers should be reflecting on, or “the kinds of criteria that should come into play during the process of reflection.” One of the reasons for this confusion is that there has been a hodgepodge of definitions, activities, strategies, and approaches to reflection presented both in the fields of education and second language education and there has been no consistency within any of these approaches or models that teachers, regardless of their experience, can apply to their everyday professional practice (see Chapter 1 for a detailed discussion on this). However, in Promoting Teacher Reflection in Second-Language Education: A Framework for TESOL Professionals, I provide a comprehensive framework that brings reflective practice together for teachers at all levels of teaching experience.

I have really been exploring this possibility of an overall reflective practice framework for over 35 years while teaching in Ireland, South Korea, Singapore, USA, and Canada. During this time I have read a lot of literature on reflective practice but as I mentioned above, I keep returning to the work of two scholars that have influenced and continue to influence my work: John Dewey and Donald Schön. I realize that I am attracted to their work because they were very pragmatic in their approaches so that they could help practicing teachers on the frontlines rather than impress academics; given my early background as a teacher in Ireland and an EFL teacher in Korea, I am still firmly connected to the reality of life in the classroom rather than the research lab. However, I do not see reflective practice as another form of navel gazing for teachers and like Dewey I consider reflective practice to be a form of systematic inquiry or evidence-based reflective practice which I also believe in and is the core of much of what is presented in this book. I was also attracted to the pragmatic work of Donald Schön (who wrote his dissertation on Dewey’s Theory of Inquiry), and especially his concept of reflection-in-action, or reflecting while you are teaching. Dewey’s and Schön’s legacies are important because they moved the concept of reflection far beyond everyday simple wonderings about a situation (or mulling over something without taking action) to a more rigorous form of reflective thinking whereby a teacher systematically investigates a perceived problem in order to discover a workable solution over time.

Early Framework

I made some early attempts to develop some kind of model or framework for reflecting on practice that would encompass the work of both Dewey and Schön, where teachers are encouraged to engage in evidence-based reflective practice (e.g., see Farrell, 2004). At that time my model emphasized the idea that practicing teachers would be better able to “locate themselves within their profession and start to take more responsibility for shaping their practice” (Farrell, 2004: 6). This framework (Farrell, 2004) of reflective teaching is composed of five components: (a) a range of opportunities and activities, (b) ground rules, (c) provision for four different times or categories of reflection, (d) external input, and (e) trust. The most important aspect of this framework is to give teachers the opportunity to reflect, and I believe it is still useful today. While I have used this framework successfully and very recently with experienced language teachers in a teacher reflection group in Canada (see Farrell, 2014), and it is still useful for teachers wishing to reflect on their practice, I believe it is still too general in its overall approach and only covers three ways of reflecting on practice: group discussions, classroom observations, and written reflections. In addition, this framework may be somewhat challenging for novice teachers to enact unless they have mentors to help them. So I was looking to develop a framework that provided more depth to reflection and that included all teachers regardless of their teaching experience (see Chapter 1 for more on this model).

Developing a New Framework

I re-read and reflected on both Dewey’s and Schön’s work recently as well as other scholars and revisited my early framework of reflection following my work with three experienced Canadian ESL teachers (Farrell, 2014) to see if I could develop an overall framework of reflective practice for TESOL professionals. I also re-examined other different models and frameworks to see if these held any useful points for me to consider. For example, one early model, which I call the “Loop Model” by Donald Schön and Chris Argyris, developed the notion of single-loop and double-loop learning (see Argyris and Schön, 1974). Without getting into too much detail here it was the “looping” back and forth (or framing and reframing a problem) that attracted me again to this model. I also re-read Schön’s work where he distinguished between technical rationality and tacit knowledge or the theory-practice gap. Schön (1983) was interested in how professionals “know” through their practice because he was convinced they know more about their practice than they can articulate. As Schön (1983: vii) noted: “We are in need of inquiry into the epistemology of practice. What is the kind of knowing in which competent practitioners engage? How is professional knowing like and unlike the kinds of knowing in academic textbooks, scientific papers and journals?” Schön, like Dewey, maintained that reflection begins in professional practice, some of which may be “messy” and confusing and so even though teachers may have obtained their subject matter knowledge—their theoretical knowledge (technical rationality)—this does not explain what actual classroom practice is because teachers obtain their tacit knowledge from these real-classroom experiences. As such, teachers must engage in reflection-in-action (thinking on their feet) as well as reflection-on-action (after the class) and these should be documented in some manner so that they can also help teachers to reflect-for-action (see Farrell, 2004). As Stanley (1998: 585) has noted, these entail what “reflective practitioners do when they look at their work in the moment (reflect-in-action) or in retrospect (reflect-on-action) in order to examine the reasons and beliefs underlying their actions and generate alternative actions for the future.”

One further model/framework that also influenced the development of the framework presented in this book is Shapiro and Reiff’s (1993) model from the field of psychology. Shapiro and Reiff (1993) called their model, reflective inquiry on practice (or RIP) and it divided the process of reflection into five basic levels—philosophy, basic theory, theory of technique, technique, and moves. Although this model was developed mostly for the purposes of interviewing experienced practitioners (in a retrospective analysis type discussion) interested in analyzing their practice, and it does not address the important issue of critical reflection, nevertheless, I like their idea of different stages or levels of reflection and so decided to incorporate something similar into my new Framework for Reflecting on Practice for language teachers. The five different stages or levels of the new framework presented in this book are: Philosophy; Principles; Theory; Practice; and Beyond Practice. Chapter 3 outlines and discusses this framework in more detail.

Conclusion

In this introductory chapter I have attempted to map out where and how I developed the new Framework for Reflecting on Practice developed from my many years of work with the concept of reflective practice. This new framework, which consists of five stages/levels of reflection that starts with reflecting on philosophy and then moves to principles, theory, practice, and beyond practice, can be used by all language teachers regardless of their level of teaching experience. This makes it unique in our field because to my knowledge no such overall framework exists. In addition, teachers are encouraged to reflect beyond practice or beyond their classroom, a much neglected aspect of reflecting on practice in second language education. The remaining chapters explain the concept of reflection (and contemplation), the framework, and how the framework can be navigated by all teachers.

2
Contemplation and Reflection

Introduction

The term “reflection” comes from the Latin word “reflectere” and means “to bend back” (Valli, 1997: 67) or to look back and become more aware of a past event or issue. Some teachers may think of reflection as common sense thinking in that most people tend to think about what they do, such as teachers thinking about what they want to do before a class, and/or thinking about how a lesson went. Some scholars have suggested that this is not real reflective practice as it does not involve any systematic reflections in any ordered manner and as such should not be included with the concept of reflective practice. Although, I agree that this type of “common sense” reflection tends to be vague, and not very organized, I believe it can be an important prerequisite to the more disciplined and ordered reflection that is more evidence-based and is presented in this book. I believe that teachers can actually develop their “common sense reflections” a bit more and enter into “contemplative reflective practice” in its more developed stage. In this chapter I introduce the idea of contemplation as an awareness raising reflective tool and in Chapter 3 (under stage/level 1 of the framework, philosophy) I discuss “contemplative reflective practice” in more detail. In this chapter I also outline and discuss definitions, approaches, purposes, and models or frameworks of reflective practice. These deliberations then set the scene for the introduction to the framework for reflective practice (see Chapter 3) that will best facilitate the development of reflection for teachers at all levels of experience.

Contemplation

The concept of contemplation and its awareness raising effects has long been a part of great religions and philosophical studies. For example, in Buddhism practitioners are encouraged to become more mindful of the “here-and-now,” and Existentialism encourages contemplation of the inevitable mortality of human beings. Such contemplations place individuals at the center of the contemplative process but without trying to take any control or intervention of the contemplations so that they become more aware of their surroundings in a more mindful way. In order to engage in such a contemplative process as Miller (1994: 3) explains, means possessing a “radical openness in which the individual does not try to control what is happening.” Such contemplations mean being able to consciously observe the self in the present moment simply by paying “careful attention and quiet wonder,” (Buchman, 1989: 39) without any intervention so that we can become more aware of who we are as human beings.

I believe that such contemplation can be a precursor to more systematic and evidence-based reflective practice because it can help teachers become more aware of themselves as human beings first. I also believe that in order to gain such knowledge of who we are and how we interact with the world we need to engage in contemplation because we usually hold such tacit knowledge in our subconscious. As Polanyi (1967: 4) has noted, much of our knowledge is difficult to put into words and “we know more than we can tell.” Thus using Polanyi’s (1962, 1967) views on tacit knowledge we can say that contemplation could be a pre-logical phase of knowing. For example, Polanyi (1962: 54) observed that when a person (in any field) carries out a skillful performance, this performance includes “actions, recognitions, and judgments which we know how to carry out spontaneously; we do not have to think about them prior to or during” the performance. The person carrying out the performance may be unaware of ever having learned the skill or how he or she became skilled in the first place. He or she just performs. In fact, it is like recognizing a face in a crowd without being able to list the features of that face in words or as Polanyi (1967: 5) says: “We recognize the moods of the human face, without being able to tell, except quite vaguely, by what signs we know it.” I call this “contemplative reflective practice” (see Chapter 3 for more details) and a necessary pre-logical phase of “reflection” so that we can become more aware of who we are as human beings. For language teachers awareness of ourselves as human beings is a necessary starting point in any teacher reflections because as Knezedivc (2001:10) has indicated, we should become aware of “who we are” before reflecting on “what we do.”

Reflective Moment

• Are you a contemplative person by nature?
• How has contemplating affected your work?
• Do you think reflecting is the same as contemplating?
• How would you define reflection and reflective practice (compare your answer to what you read in the next section and the reflective moment that follows)?

Reflection

As mentioned abov...