An Initial Distinction: Reflective Teaching and

Technical Teaching

UNDERSTANDING REFLECTIVE TEACHING – Chapter 1

• If you reflect about your teaching will this necessarily make your teaching better?

• Can reflective teaching be bad teaching?

• What distinguishes reflective teaching from non-reflective teaching?

• Is there such a thing as a non-reflective teacher?

Reflective Teaching: An Introduction 2nd Edition Routledge 2013 Kenneth M. Zeichner and Daniel P. Liston

In order to teach don't you have to think about your teaching?

And isn't such thinking the same thing as reflecting on your teaching?

If a teacher never questions the goals and the values that guide his or her work, the context in which he or she teaches, or never examines his or her assumptions…

then it is our belief that this individual is not engaged in reflective teaching.

This view is based on a distinction between teaching that is reflective and teaching that is technically focused.

• Did your own teacher education program prepare you to be the kind of teacher who questions the educational goals and the classroom and school contexts?

On Reflective Teaching

• When you think about a classroom problem, do you try to see it from different "angles"?

• Do you think that teachers should play leadership roles in curriculum development, program development, and school reform or just stick to their work in the classroom?

During the last two decades, the slogan of reflective teaching has been embraced by teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers all over the world.

The move toward seeing teachers as reflective practitioners is also a rejection of top-down forms of educational reform that involve teachers only as conduits for implementing programs and ideas formulated elsewhere.

On the surface, the reflective practice movement involves a recognition that teachers should be active in formulating the purposes and ends of their work…

That they examine their own values and assumptions…

And that they need to play leadership roles in curriculum development and school reform.

have attempted to define a so-called "knowledge base" for teaching that excludes the voices and insights of teachers themselves.

Colleges, Universities, and Research and Development Centers…

The voices of teachers, the questions and problems they pose, the frameworks they use to interpret and improve their practice, and the ways they define and understand their work lives are absent from the literature of research on teaching.

Lytle and Cochran-Smith argued that because of teachers' direct involvement in the classroom, they bring a perspective to understanding the complexities of teaching that cannot be matched by external researchers.

As Susan Lytle and Marilyn Cochran-Smith (1990) said:

Reflective teaching emphasizes five key featuresA reflective teacher:

• examines, frames, and attempts to solve the dilemmas of classroom practice

• is aware of and questions the assumptions and values he or she brings to teaching

• is attentive to the institutional and cultural contexts in which he or she teaches

• takes responsibility for his or her own professional development

• takes part in curriculum development and is involved in school change efforts

The Bandwagon of Reflective Teaching

Amidst the explosion of interest in the idea of teachers as reflective practitioners, there has been a great deal of confusion about what is meant in particular instances by the use of the term reflective teaching.

Underlying the apparent similarity among those who have embraced the concept of reflective teaching are vast differences in perspectives about teaching, learning, schooling, and the social order.

According to Calderhead (1989):Reflective teaching has been justified on grounds ranging from moral responsibility to technical effectiveness, and reflection has been incorporated into teacher education courses as divergent as those employing a behavioral skills approach, in which reflection is viewed as a means to the achievement of certain prescribed practices, to those committed to a critical science approach in which reflection is seen as a means toward emancipation and professional autonomy.

One of the central problems has to do with the vagueness and ambiguity of the term, and with a misunderstanding of what is entailed in reflective teaching.

— Is any thinking about teaching that teachers do reflective teaching?

— Is any action a teacher takes supportable, just because they have thought about it in some systematic way?

We would answer no to both of these questions.