5. Discussion
5.2 Reflection
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with the experience of attending the teacher education program and those experiences taking place after her participation in the program adding some of theoretical vigor, other than experiential reinforcement, to the cognitions. However, what also merits our attention is that, such formation and development of cognitions out of the experiences that teachers accumulate can hardly be made without one very essential activity undertaken by teachers themselves, that is, reflection, which is elaborated in the following section.
5.2 Reflection
As shown in the case of Joy and existing literature, the experience of language teachers may have significant impacts on their cognitions and classroom practices.
However, the findings of this study also revealed that the impacts could barely have been made if Joy had not reflected on the experiences that she had. In sharing her learning and teaching experiential stories, Joy stressed the significant role that reflection played in her professional development, describing it as some sort of catalyst that helped her to attach meanings to the experiences that she accumulated at different phases of her professional life. The important role that reflection plays has also been discussed in many of the extant studies, which affirm that impacts can hardly occur without teachers’ reflection on the experience (Bailey et al., 1996; Ellis, 2004; Farrell, 2007b; Wallace, 1991). As Farrell (2007b) pointed out, “we do not learn much from experience alone as we learn from reflecting on that experience (p. 2)”.
With increased recognition of its importance, reflection is no longer an
unfamiliar concept in the field of teaching, including that of TESOL; however, there does lack a general consensus as to what this notion means (Farrell, 2007b; Hatton &
Smith, 1995; Jay & Johnson, 2002; Loughran, 2002). Farrell (2007b), in an
introduction to reflective teaching, noted that there were two major views of reflective
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teaching, with one “emphasizing reflection only on classroom actions (p. 3)” and the other including reflection on both events taking place inside and outside the classroom.
According to Jay and Johnson (2002), the latter view of reflective teaching, which they termed as “critical reflection”, generally entailed connecting teaching to “the broader historical, sociopolitical and moral context of schooling (p. 79)” and teachers by doing so “came to see themselves as agents of change (p. 79)”.
In the present study, Joy’s definition of reflection is in line with the notion of critical reflection delineated by Jay and Johnson (2002). For Joy, reflection was reflecting on the experiences that a teacher underwent and the thoughts that she was engaged in during the experiences so that she could use them for examinations of herself, her students and the relationship between theory and practice, which could then serve as the basis for future change in her cognitions and classroom practices.
Such reflection was found to be undertaken by Joy at three types of moments, corresponding to the three kinds of reflective teaching, that is, reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action and reflection-for-action, noted in Farrell (2007b). According to Joy, she generally engaged herself in a state of reflection while experiencing the various and varied events taking place inside and outside the classroom. Such reflection was termed by Schön (1983) as reflection-in-action. Schön explained that reflection-in-action was the sort of reflection that practitioners undertook to examine the actions and the knowing-in-action underpinning the actions when they were conducting the actions but faced with “situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness and value conflict (p. 50)”. In the stories of Joy, such reflection was mentioned to be undertaken in almost every critical experience that she had, including her traumatic English learning experience in senior high school, her first-year
teaching experience in La La junior high school and her experience of the educational visit to Holland, Belgium and France. However, the thoughts produced out of such
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reflection undertaken during the critical events could be very different from those produced out of re-reflection on the same critical events after the occurrence of the events. This kind of reflection conducted after the actions happened was called reflection-on-action (Schön, 1983). According to Joy, the increased experience resulted from the lapse of time between the occurrence of events and the undertaking of re-reflection on the events often led to different thoughts, ideas and interpretations of the same events. For example, while undergoing the painful English learning experience in senior high school, Joy said her reflection-in-action was mainly focused on frustration that she had and the belief that such frustration was for a major part resulted from her English teacher’s lacking knowledge about her students. But after about a decade, when she started teaching and contemplated the experience in
retrospect, she was more able to disengage herself from the intense negative emotions that she once had and to transform those negative emotions into the practical
cognition and practice of knowing and empathizing with her students while teaching in large multilevel English classes. Such difference was also evident in her
reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action of her teaching experience in La La junior high school. During the year of teaching in La La junior high school, Joy said she often undertook reflection-in-action to deal with the matters she encountered in the school, which was probably the most remote and resource-deficient school that she had ever seen. Nevertheless, she also admitted that it was not until later after she had taught for years in some other schools that she could engage herself in
reflection-on-action of her experience in La La junior high school and relate her teaching there to the broader socio-cultural, socio-educational and socio-economic contexts of the school and come to hold more firmly her cognitions of knowing and empathizing with students, adding differentiation to the criteria and admitting certain things were beyond her control. In addition to reflection-in-action and
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reflection-on-action, Joy also mentioned her undertaking of reflection during her design of teaching materials and activities, where she contemplated on the relevant experiences so to use them as a basis for the design of materials and activities to be used in class. This kind of reflection was called by Farrell (2007b) as
reflection-for-action, which was distinct from the other two kinds of reflection in that
“it is proactive in nature (p. 6)”. When engaged in such type of reflection, Joy was using the related learning and teaching experiences of hers to help her prepare for the teaching and reach a desired outcome in the future.
The undertaking of reflection during, after and before teaching prodded Joy to search for and/or review relevant theories and further benefit from such practice.
These benefits included improved abilities to combine educational theories and teaching practices and enhancement in teaching and teacher-student relationship. In the interviews, Joy more than once mentioned the benefits of reflective teaching, in particular her enhanced abilities to connect theories with practices:
When I was participating in the in-service teacher education MA program, it’s like I was undergoing some sort of dramatic change (laughing). Because I had had about ten years of teaching experience, and plus I had these reflective capabilities. Well people say Virgos have this strength, always asking themselves why questions and reflecting on their experiences. So with these [the rich teaching experience and reflection on the experience], I thought about, knew and learnt which teaching practice was related to which practice. (I1, p.
21)
The contribution that a teacher’s reflection can make to their combination of theory and practice has also been noted and discussed in several studies (Kabilan, 2007; Orland-Barak & Yinon, 2007). In their study, Orland-Barak and Yinon (2007)
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examined how a group of pre-service EFL teachers in Israel came to connect theory and practice in a reflective task designed by the teacher education program. They found that through reflection, these prospective teachers “exhibited unique
connections between theory and practice at various levels of mapping, contesting, informing, appraising and planning (p. 966)” and attributed such gains on the part of the prospective teachers to the rather formal, structured and evaluative reflective activity these teachers were engaged in, which required them to reflect on their own practice as they would be graded on their abilities to articulate and examine their practices and the knowledge underpinning the practice. In another study conducted by Kabilan (2007), student teachers’ improved abilities to merge theory and practice was also found to be one of the outcomes of their engagement in reflection, which
included positive attitudes toward teaching and learning, development of relevant skills, and improved linguistic abilities as well. While not a small number of studies about reflective practice was conducted in the pre-service contexts, few studies, however, were carried out with in-service teachers. Of those studies about the
reflection of in-service teachers, most were concerned with the content (Farrell, 1999;
Mok, 1994), the nature (Farrell, 1999), and the development process of their reflection (Farrell, 1999; Mok, 1994; Wyatt, 2010), very few were conducted to investigate the impact of teachers’ reflection on their and students’ performance in the classroom, which might account for the practical consideration raised in the study of Akbari (2007). In his study, Akabari proposed practical problems with regard of reflective practice, one of which was that reflective practice did not seem to result in improved teacher and student performance. In response to Akabari’s concern, this study, however, found evidence from the teacher participant, Joy, that reflective practice undertaken by a teacher could have a positive impact on her teaching performance and the relationship she established with students, though what specific impacts and
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how exactly reflective practice could contribute to such impacts were unclear as which was not the main focuses of the present study.
In a hope that language teachers can engage themselves in and benefit from reflective practice, many scholars, researchers, and teacher educators have been discussing ways to develop teachers’ reflectivity (Hatton & Smith, 1995; Jay &
Johnson, 2002; Stanley, 1998). In the case of Joy, her own capability to reflect, however, was perceived by her to be partly inborn. Despite perceiving so, Joy still believed such capability to reflect could be developed by searching for and reading academic research articles, appealing to the theoretical knowledge within and using the knowledge to reconstruct their experiences and appropriate and/or re-appropriate the knowledge, as the three teachers of ESL and EFL in the study of Golombek and Johnson (2004) did. In analyzing the narratives written by the three teachers, Golombek and Johnson found that these teachers engaged themselves in a kind of critical reflection and appealed to theoretical knowledge to reconceptualize and reinterpret their experiences, which enabled them to make changes of different levels to their classroom practices.
As discussed so far, it is quite clear that the experiences that Joy underwent could not have such significant impacts on her cognitions and practices in large
multilevel English classes if she had not reflected on the experiences. From Joy’s case, one can see that the personal experiences of a teacher are like her personally unique resources, but these resources can hardly be made significant to her if she does not assign meanings to them through reflection. What also merits one’s attention is that the meanings that a teacher gives to their experiences are not always static but
dynamic, which are open to reconceptualization and reinterpretation every time when the teacher engages herself in reflection on the experiences. This study hence suggests that teachers be encouraged to undertake reflection at the three types of moments
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delineated by Farrell (2007b) so to make good use of and benefit from their personally unique experiences. This study also advances that while undertaking reflection,
teachers can appeal to theoretical knowledge to use it as a reference for conducting reflection and developing reflective skills. During the formation and development of reflective skills, some teachers may need less guidance and scaffolds, like the teacher participant, Joy, in the present study, but some do require assistance of different kinds, such as the teaching about reflection (Gunn, 2010; Liou, 2001), the provision of a supportive environment for reflection (Farrell, 1999; Liou, 2001; Orland-Barak &
Yinon, 2007; Wyatt, 2010) and the offering of an expert other (Farrell, 1999, 2007a;
Golombek and Johnson, 2004), from their colleagues and teacher educators. Lastly, as indicated in the present study, a teacher’s reflective practice may lead to improved teacher performance, but what exactly these improvements are about and how they are related to the teacher’s reflective practice needs to be further explored. More research is needed in investigating the relationship between teachers’ reflective
practice and their and their students’ performance in large multilevel English classes.