LA REDE GLOBO Y ‘EL PADRINO’, ROBERTO MARINHO

There are several key issues that have been highlighted in this review. The chapter begins with a description of the theoretical background that underpins ‘reflection’ in teacher education. There are a number of competing views and arguments from different scholars on how reflection is perceived especially when it is applied in teaching. Drawing from the discussions of the concepts of reflection (in 3.2 & 3.3) it could be summarised that reflection is a rigorous way of thinking which involves questioning and challenging received opinions and accepted practices in order to make sense of things. Reflection is associated with the activity of identifying strengths, weaknesses and suggesting improvements in teaching (SWIS) and reflection is mainly a writing activity (see 5.2 and RQ1). The combination of the different concepts and

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perceptions of reflection helps to give a different dimension to the meaning of ‘reflection’ in the context of teaching.

This review also identified some of the benefits of reflection (RQ2) such as sharing reflections with others helps to develop ideas about teaching from different perspectives (in 3.2.4). This is one of the areas being investigated in this study and through the interviews with the student teachers (see 5.4), they perceived that sharing written reflections with peers encourage positive exchanges of ideas that help to solve teaching problems collaboratively.

Critical reflection as presented in the frameworks (see 3.5.2) is positioned at the highest level of reflection. Sometimes critical reflection is synonymous with critical thinking since both involve complex cognitive abilities to solve problems and make decisions. Critical reflection also emphasises considering the broader social, political, and economic dimensions when examining and solving teaching issues. These are the dimensions expected to be seen in student teachers’ written reflections which are ‘critical’. However, this is not entirely the case especially when the student teachers lack teaching experience and are still in training (see Chapter 8). There are studies (in 3.6) that examined student teachers’ reflective journals and found that the focus of the reflection is mainly on teaching. These ‘features’ have guided me in analysing the written reflections student teachers wrote in this study. It revealed similar findings as can be seen in the topics of the reflections (RQ3) and I have used the term ‘teaching- centric’ (see 3.7, 6.3 and 8.2.1) to refer to student teachers’ written reflections that predominantly focused their discussions on teaching.

Usually, the level of reflection is used to indicate the quality of reflection. The literature also seems to suggest that the criteria for the level of reflections are used to define what reflective writing is (see 3.5.2). This would seem to be inappropriate since the criteria for assessment and defining what ‘reflection’ is are two different things. In addition, some of the criteria or levels of reflection as suggested in the different frameworks may not be suitable to assess some of the reflections especially when they are written in different contexts, e.g. the criteria in the frameworks are used with experienced teachers but the same criteria are also used with student teachers whose English is their second language. So, I believe that the criteria for evaluating reflective writing should be context specific. In this study, I collected and examined student teachers’ reflective journals and as a result five features of reflective writing were found

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(see 6.5 and RQ4). These features could be used as guidelines to help student teachers structure their reflections during teaching practice.

The review in Chapter 2 provides the contextual background to this research and discusses the support that student teachers received in reflective writing (RQ5). For example, a sample reflection and guidelines in writing daily and weekly reflections were given to student teachers to guide them to write their reflections. Encouraging student teachers to share their reflections with others could develop their understanding of their teaching practice further (in 5.4). In addition, there are studies (e.g. Hussin, 2004; Min, Mansor, and Samsudin, 2016) that found frameworks of reflective writing are particularly helpful in providing structure and develop student teachers’ reflective skills. Despite this, close guidelines and frameworks used to aid student teachers’ reflective writing resulted in student teachers’ reflections being ‘structured’ and ‘narrow’ as the findings show in this study (see 9.2).

The issues highlighted in this review relate directly to my own study since they concern the various ways of reflection is conceptualised, its role in developing student teachers’ thinking and the impact it has on teacher education programmes. My study not only investigated student teachers’ engagement with the process of reflective writing, but also explored how the participants in my research themselves conceptualise the notion of ‘reflection’ as it is a relatively under-explored area in the literature, yet an essential starting point for developing improvements (RQ6) to current teacher education programmes in the practice of reflection (see 8.2 and 9.2).

More importantly, the methods used to investigate these issues have influenced the design, the construction of the interview questions and the methodology used in my research. For example, the studies which I have reviewed investigated student teachers’ reflective process via level of reflection to determine the quality of the reflections student teachers wrote. They mainly adopted either a qualitative or quantitative approach in analysing the level of reflection based on pre-determined framework or criteria. As for my research, I adopted a mixed method approach in analysing student teachers’ reflective journals starting with a quantitative analysis to identify the topics student teachers wrote most in their reflections and open coding to categorise the topics. I then conducted a close textual analysis of student teachers’ written reflections and interviews, approaching it from bottom up, to investigate what student teachers’ ‘see’ (their perceptions of reflection) and how they ‘engage’ in the reflective process, which I

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demonstrated through ‘patterns of flow’ (see 6.5). These are the areas which other studies have paid little attention to. In addition, I used the gaps that I found from the previous studies to formulate the interview questions (see Appendix U, V, W, X and Y) and develop the ‘interview schedule’ (see 4.8.2) so that I could investigate student teachers’ engagement in reflection further and suggest possible improvements to develop better training in reflective writing (RQ6). Further discussion about analysing the interviews and written reflections can be found in the next chapter.

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