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Analyzing the internal structure of teacher reflection
from closer looking portfolio texts
Jukka Husu, Auli Toom & Sanna Patrikainen
University of Helsinki
Paper presented at the American Educational Research Asasociation (AERA) Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 9-13 April 2007
abstract This study is a further inquiry into the basic structure of teachers’ reflective thinking. It illustrates a constructivist account of teacher knowledge through a detailed demonstration of how interactional knowledge construction occurs in portfolios.We aim to gain a greater understanding of the process and outcomes of portfolio writing by examining 1) What is the internal structure of student teachers’ pedagogical reflection in their portfolio presentations?, and 2) How do portfolio presentations contribute to the development of student teachers’ pedagogical knowing? Analyzing closer portfolio texts revealed that It was possible to define six main starting points of reflective episodes and several subcategories under each of them. Also, the chains of reflective episodes were analyzed according to their top-down (deductive) and bottom-up (inductive) dimensions, together with their static and dynamic features. According to our results, it is possible to contend that student teachers can reflect beyond solely practical issues on teaching, articulate multiple concerns about their practice, and think them in an integrative manner.
1.Purpose of the Study
In teacher education, there is a clear expectation that during their studies student teachers engage in such practices that enable reflection both as a process and outcome. At the surface, the politics and rationale of teacher reflection are alluring, but its integration into studies of teacher education often exposes its limitations.The same critical issues also relate to the use of portfolios in teacher education. According to Delandshere & Arens (2003), portfolios tend to appear to be “some sort of empirical data collection venture[s] to build on key words from the standards but missing the broader theoretical perspective[s] indispensable to make sense of [their] data” (p. 72).No doubt,many student teachers and teacher educators express puzzlement and dismay when they face the task of reflective writing and interpretation of those texts (Spalding & Wilson, 2002).Therefore, our challenge as researchers and teacher educators is to develop and testappropriate methodological tools that can appropriately guide the development of pedagogical reflection.We also need to develop a more detailed analysis of portfolio presentations as a vehicle for better understanding teachers’ professional knowledge and its development during teacher education and beyond.
This study is a further inquiry into the basic structure of teachers’ reflective thinking. It illustrates a constructivist account of teacher knowledge through a detailed demonstration of how interactional knowledge construction occurs in student portfolios.
We aim to gain a greater understanding of the process and outcomes of portfolio writing by examining
1)What is the internal structure of student teachers’ pedagogical reflection in their portfolio presentations?
2)How do portfolio presentations contribute to the development of student teachers’ pedagogical knowing?
The study examines the quality of reflection in portfolios and the inferences drawn from them. It allows us to see more closely what creates changes in teachers’ knowledge and to focus on the reflective processes through which such changes are happening.
2.Theoretical Framework
2.1Reflective judgement in teaching
In reviewing the literature on teacher reflection, significant critiques of the loose use and effectiveness of teacher reflection have come from several directions. For example, Eraut (1995); Reiman (1999), Evans (2002), and Klenovski (2002) have argued against the loose use of the concept of reflection. They report that teacher reflection tends to be seen as an ideal solution to the problems teachers face when it comes to reviewing their teaching. It is often supposed that teacher reflection actually does something, or that being reflective has some sort of transformative power regarding a prior ‘unreflective’ teacher condition.This is because the concept of reflection is often used vaguely (Parker, 1997). As Lynch (2000) argues, the concept and practice of reflection is interpreted in various and even contra dictionary ways. According to him,
[i]n some social theories it is an essential human capacity, in others it is a system property, and in still others it is a critical, or self-critical, act. Reflexivity, or being reflective, is often claimed as a methodological virtue and source of superior insight … or awareness (p. 26).
In spite of/due to difficulties, reflective thinking is an essential competency in identifying, analyzing and solving the complex problems that characterize teachers’ work in classrooms. Dewey (1933) defined reflection as the “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it tends” (p. 9).As the definition states, reflection is a complex and rigorous enterprise that takes time and effort to do well. It often begins with a state of doubt or even confusion and moves through the act of searching some sort of evidence that will “resolve, clarify, or otherwise address the doubt” (Spalding & Wilson, 2002, p. 1394).
Here, according to Dewey, two concepts – sequence and consequence- are of vital importance. This is because thought is reflective only “if it is [somehow] logically sequenced and includes a [some kind of] consideration of the consequences of a decision [or action]” (Valli, 1997, p. 68). Thus, reflective thought looks back on assumptions and beliefs on which it is grounded, and simultaneously it looks forward to the implications or consequences of a reported action. It is an exercise in sustaining multiple, and sometimes opposite, elements and emotions in teaching. Being reflective means “expanding rather than narrowing the psychic, social and cultural fields of analysis” (Luttrell, 2000, p. 516). Hence, reflection is mainly a question of fully recognizing the often ambivalent relations within situations being studied.
Teacher reflection of this art calls for a strong sense of contextuality. Thus, the concept of teacher rationality must be understood as involving properties of persons (attitudes, dispositions, habits of mind and character traits) and all sorts of contextual factors that are involved in teaching situations (Garrison, 1999). Teachers’ pedagogical knowledge takes shape and develops in such active contexts.They are situations whereateacher recognizes that the problems cannot be solved by formal logic/knowledge alone, and involve careful consideration of one’s own beliefs in relation to the events being analyzed. This kind of teacher reflection implies a reconstruction of experiences on how teachers explicate their actions and assumptions. The uncovering of those reflective explanations is essential for understanding teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and how it is gained.
Baxter Magolda (2004) uses the term epistemological reflection to refer to assumptions about the nature of such knowledge construction. According to her stance, beliefs about self, learning, and classroom instruction are part of a teacher’s personal epistemology in reflection.Teachers actively make meaning of their experiences – they interpret what has happened to them, evaluate it using their own perspectives, and draw conclusions about what those experiences mean to them. The meanings they construct depend on their personal understandings about themselves as persons and as teachers, events they encounter, and the contexts in which their experiences occur. As Baxter Magoda (2004, p. 31) concludes, shifts in personal epistemology stem from the interaction of internal (e.g. assumptions) and external (e.g. experiences) sources. Thus, personal epistemology is intertwined with dimensions of teacher identity and multiple relations (Baxter Magolda,2001). From this standpoint, teacher reflection is thus seen as having considerable potential for the development of teachers’ professional knowledge.
2.2Guided reflection in portfolios
As presented, reflection is believed to be a genuine way of fostering change in teachers’ professional action. However, the problem is how teachers actually extract meaning from their teaching experiences. Evidence suggests that reflecting on experience alone and in vacuum may be difficult (Thies-Sprinthall, 1984; Zeichner, 1996; Reiman, 1999). As such,reflection often needs to be guided in order to fulfil its learning potential (Boud et. al., 1985). Already Dewey (1933) emphasized that thinking is natural but that reflective habits of mind often need some sort of guidance and support.Hence the term guided reflection. In this study, by guidance we mean the complement phases of teacher reflection to effectively challenge and support student teachers to learn through their teaching experiences. We aim to guide student teachers’ pedagogical reflection according to their learning needs as they engage in their new teaching roles.
Acting with this kind of manner requires help of a particular method: careful consideration of teaching practice by means of structured reflective tasks whichare hope to lead to better understanding of teaching and its underlying issues (Johns, 1996; Fish & Coles, 1998). Student teachers can be aided to be more competent (and effective) by helping them to identify and understand their work and its contradictions: the gap between what they aim to achieve and their actual practice. It is hoped that this procedure of guided reflection acts as a catalyst for student teachers to challenge their “habitual practice” and “implicit norms” and to consider what they have learnt through their reflective portfolio tasks(Lieberman, 1989; Orlando-Barak & Yinon, 2007).
Theoretical support for portfolios as reflective tools is strong (Wolf et. al., 1995).Proponents of portfolio use claim that portfolios provide a structure for teachers to document their teaching and articulate their professional knowledge of how and why they teach the way they do (Borko et al., 1997; Loughran & Corrigan, 1995; Zeichner & Liston, 1987). Portfolios provide evidence for critical examination of teaching and learning experiences.According to Shulman (1998), teacher constructed portfolios can make teachers’ pedagogical knowledge more public and visible. They can contribute teachers’ professional development by making explicit their tacit knowledge, and consequently, increase teachers’ professional autonomy for future action. Shulman (ibid.) views portfolio construction as an act of a teacher’s theory making. As he states, “what is declared worth documenting, worth reflecting on … is a theoretical act” (p. 24). Therefore, it is the theory of teaching that gives meaning to every portfolio entry.
3 METHODS OF INQUIRY
3.1 Data sources
The study, presented in this paper, is a part of our wider research project. In this project we have developed a practical model called “the procedure of guided reflection”(Husu, Patrikainen & Toom, 2007). The procedure is based on the theoretical ideas of reflection, especially on the Deweyean perspective (Rodgers, 2002), which includes personal intentions, interaction and time as its central elements. In practice, the procedure consists of videotaped lessons, stimulated recall interviews and repeated reflective discussions, in which the focus is on the critical incident chosen from the videotaped lesson.
The data of this research project was collected from eight student teachers during their final teaching practice period. The general aim of the teaching practicum is to achieve competencies for teacher profession: to get overall impression of teacher’s everyday work, to plan, organise and evaluate the whole instructional process and to analyse this process and one’s own thinking and action in it from theoretical perspectives.The practice period is supervised by an expert class teacher and a university lecturer who discusses and gives feedback for a student teacher.
The data collection was conducted by using the procedure of guided reflection described above. After videotaping an optional lesson and the stimulated recall interview student teachers chose an incident according their own intentions for further examination during the two following reflective discussions. At the first meeting, around a week later, student teachers considered this incident from different perspectives and in wider context with the help of the researcher. The second discussion was conducted in the form of a reflective portfolio presentation.
3.2 Data analysis
The qualitative analyses presented in this paper are a continuation of our previous study (Husu, Patrikainen & Toom, 2007), where we investigated the quality of reflection in student teachers’ portfolio presentations: the forms of reflection and the interactive positioning of reflective statements throughout their portfolio texts. On the grounds of those analyses, we become convinced that reflective statements can not be fully understood or explained if their thematic (reflective) content is all that is taken into account. The expressions of reflective utterances seem to respond to a greater or lesser degree to other (‘nearby’) reflective statements as well. That is, an analyst can not interpret written and represented content alone. Interpretation of a reflective statement requires the construction of a second, interactional level, because the words used in any utterance are part of larger contexts (Husu, 2005). This is just what content-based analyses often ignore: how interpreted statements are positioned in an ongoing ‘dialogue’ with all the other parts of the written text, their contexts.
These findings led us to examine the internal structure, the course and the possible regularities of the student teachers’ portfolio presentations more carefully. Figure 1 shows how the different forms of reflection are presented within one exemplar portfolio text (Student 7) in our data
Figure 1.The interactive positioning of reflective statements.
The analysis of this study is premised both on a theory-basedcoding scheme concerning the forms of reflection and on data-based classification. The coding scheme is developed in our previous study and there we have used the works of Boud Walker (1991), Wallace & Louden (2000), Korthagen et al. (2001), and Kember et al. (1999) as our starting base. After our data analysis, we concluded to define six forms of reflection: 1) introspection, 2) association, 3) integration, 4) validation, 5) appropriation and 6) transformation (Husu, Patrikainen & Toom, 2006).
In the analysis, written portfolio texts were taken for their capacity to reveal student teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and “to represent their thinking” (Freeman, 1996., p. 734, original emphasis). What teachers know could be seen in the language they use in their portfolios. According these ideas we considered all the text in portfolios to be reflection of some sort and therefore whole portfolio text were included in the analysis, not only some parts of it. The whole analysis was done by two researchers. During the analysing process they constantly compared each others’ tentative impressions and after these discussions they concluded to a common interpretation of the nature and quality of the reflective statements in question.After careful reading of portfolios, the first step in analyzing the data was to divide portfolio text into reflective meaning units and to identify these units with one of the six forms of reflection. The end of the unit was identified by a change in the form of reflection. The transitions between the forms were not clear cut by their nature; rather, the categories employed were elusive and included connections to previous reflections. Meaning units ranged in length from some short sentences to longer pieces of nearly 200 words.
To examine theinternal structure of the reflection in the second step of analysis, the portfolio text was divided again. This time division was made according to the content of reflection, and as a result reflection episodes were identified. One reflection episode consisted on an average four meaning units and it included several forms of reflection, generally two or three forms. Next, the reflection episodes from all student teachers’ portfolios were collected up and classified into six categories according to their starting point. The largest amount of reflection episodes began with introspection. The amount of episodes which started with validation or transformation was small in the data. After the first classification, the reflection episodes in each main category were further classified into subcategories according to the similarity that was possible to perceive in them. In this case, the similarity means that the reflective episodes in each subcategory contain the same forms of reflection although their order within a reflection episode might vary.
During this detailed reflection episode analysis we discovered that the episodes have more general characteristics in spite of their starting point or specific content: The basis for the reflection seemed to be inductive or on the contrary, deductive by nature. Also the conclusion where the reflection process led on could be described as static or dynamic. Finally the reflection episodes were placed in four different sections according to these two dimensions and these four sections were also named according to their contents (see Figure 2).
4 RESULTS
4.1 The internal structure of pedagogical reflection in portfolio presentations
The internal structure of student teachers’ reflection is presented in this chapter. It was possible to define six main starting points of reflective episodes, and several subcategories under each of them.
- Introspection as a starting point
Introspection as a starting point of reflection means that reflection involves looking inwards and reconsidering one’s thoughts and feelings about some issue in teaching. The stance emphasizes the description of personal meaning of situations. It was possible to define five subcategories under this main category. Firstly (1.1), there were episodes in which the student teachers proved that they are aware of some essential themes in a teacher’s work in that particular moment and they possibly see it very important from the viewpoint of their own professional development. This was clearly the most common course of reflection episodes. In the second subcategory (1.2), the reflective episodes were quite similar with the previous ones (1.1) but they also contain validation which focuses either on the introspective practical situation or on the validation of an essential theme in a teacher’s work or on one’s own developmental challenge. This was quite a common course of reflection as well. Thirdly (1.3), the student teachers described their experienced practice and validated and evaluated it, but the student teachers’ reflection did not proceed any further, for example towards the new professional ideas or towards the development of one’s own action. In fourth subcategory (1.4), the experienced practice was associated with similar previous situations, but the reflection did not proceed any further from that. Fifthly (1.5), the experienced practice was associated with similar previous situations or integrated with theory. The student teachers’ reflection did not lead to the realization of different things or developmental challenges, but it strived to conceptualize the meaningful and essential practical professional experiences.