"Moving Forward by Looking Back": Enacting Teacher Reflection Through a Teacher Learning Community

• In Event: The Power of Teacher Learning Community in Foreign Language Teaching: Collaboration, Reflection, and Teacher Identity

Abstract

Objectives: This study aims to offer an insight into ‘teacher reflection’ through collaborative experiences in order to improve teachers’ foreign language teaching. This research highlights the dynamics of teacher reflection and its relation to teaching practice and teacher professional development. The primary research questions leading this study are the following: (1) how does the teacher learning community enact and support teacher reflection, and vice versa? and (2) in what ways does teacher reflection influence teacher practice?

Perspective(s): The idea of reflection, as a habit of self-monitoring, is pervasive in teacher education and teacher professional development (Schön, 1983; Zeichner & Liston, 1996). The importance of a learning community for teacher reflection relies on the fact that teachers can share individual experience with each other (Bereiter, 2002; Tillema & van der Westhuizen, 2006). By the exchange of individual reflections, teachers are enabled to look back on what their strengths and weaknesses are from their prior classes. In this regard, teacher reflection serves as the starting point for teachers to rethink and problematize their practices.

Methods: This paper applied participatory action research, especially focusing on teachers’ reflection, through various communication methods: individual teachers’ daily journals, teacher interactions in a social media, weekly meeting discussions, and semi-structured interviews. The data were coded based on a grounded theory strategy first, and categories emerged as the analysis progressed. The categories were developed from descriptive to analytical, as well as those categories that were in relation to research questions.

Results:
1. Collaborative learning acts as the place of exchanging individual reflections and thereby encourages more reflective teaching by language teachers. Here, the TLC is a purposeful form of intervention for reflective thoughts and actions. Teacher reflection also plays an essential role for teachers to take ‘inquiry stances’ (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) not only enacting an expanded view of language teaching as the interplay of teaching, learning, and interacting, but also blurring the boundary between research and practice.
2. Reflective thoughts and actions in the TLC increase the use of teachers’ “best practices” for foreign language teaching. By the notion of best practice, this study refers to two intertwined foci: teacher reflection (a) improves the quality of upcoming lessons by planning and utilizing particular pedagogical strategies based on past thoughts and actions, and (b) enables for language teachers to consider and problematize at three different but intertwined layers–knowledge, skills, and beliefs.

Scholarly significance: Teacher reflection enhances the transformational approach of the ‘teacher as a reflective practitioner’, who is critically engaging in the relationship between theory and practice. In this sense of teacher reflection, we look at the significance of teachers’ theorization as the reflection prior to and/or during teaching practices for improving students’ learning outcomes. In addition, through studies about teacher reflection within the teacher learning community, we come to know a good deal about what language teacher education programs offer in terms of activities designed to support reflection and about barriers, strategies, and effects of teacher reflection that await new language teachers as they enter the classroom.

Author

• Jonghun Kim, University of Wisconsin - Madison