Reflection in teacher education

Abstract

The concepts ‘reflection’ or ‘reflective practice’ are entrenched in the literature and discourses of teacher education and teachers’ professional development. The concept is rather vague, although Schön’s notion of the reflective practitioner seems to be at the core of several understandings. In this paper, conversations between student teachers and their mentors during internship are analysed to explore how they reflect and what they seem to accomplish through reflection. Building on sociocultural theory, reflection is constituted as collaborative communicative action through which an object of reflection is constructed and expanded by the participants. By introducing the notion ‘mode of reflection’, the relationship between reflective action and the motive of the activity are explored. In this paper, three modes of reflection during internship in teacher education are discerned and discussed: (1) reflection as induction to warranted ways of seeing, thinking and acting; (2) reflection as concept development; (3) reflection as off‐line or imagined practices.