'What went well, what didn't go so well': growth of reflection in pre-service teachers

Teacher education programs operate with the notion that reflection is a critically important characteristic and skill of an effective teacher. The ability of a teacher to reflect on his or her teaching practice is one of the State of California's Teacher Performance Expectations (TPE) and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) Standards for Teaching. Because having a skill does not always translate into the doing of a skill, these institutions want teachers to have the disposition to reflect. Teacher educators believe that having the disposition to reflect is more likely to result in the doing of reflection. Much curriculum and many assignments have been developed to foster reflection in novice teachers and teacher reflection has been analysed and studied from many vantage points. The purpose of this study was to better understand the role and development of reflection in novice teachers over time. I explored the effectiveness of a case writing assignment designed to foster reflection given as part of a first semester education methods course and then used the assignment to track the growth of reflection over time. Some of the guiding research questions were: Does the student teacher's analysis of the locus of the central problem in the case change over time? Has the student teacher's repertoire of strategies to solve the problem increased over time? Do the quantity and quality of reflection increase over time? How does the student make sense of reflection and how is it manifested in practice?