Collaborative Action Research for Preparing Teachers as Reflective Practitioners

Abstract

The study focuses on using collaborative action research projects to promote reflective practice of pre-service teachers during the internship. Research groups were composed by school tutors and pre-service teachers, assisted by the teacher educator. Twelve pre-service teachers and six school tutors were organized in three groups, two tutors and four pre-service teachers per group. Each group worked with a topic coming from problems found in the internship experience. Pre-service teachers conducted classroom observation of their tutors and classmates as well as classroom teaching by themselves. They also wrote reflective diaries of these observations and their own teaching, and participated in a learning community which was a nurturing collaborative atmosphere that provided time, space and collegial peers to share experiences and solve problems. By examining the research experience, there are some important results: a) Collaborative action research helped pre-service teachers to study and develop reflective practice abilities while participating in a learning community which somewhat filled the gaps left by the lack of some tutors’ good role modeling; b) The role of the teacher educator for improving relationships between school tutors and pre-service teachers seemed crucial in both the preventive role and remedial role; c) There is still room for improvement, especially concerning tutors’ modeling and scaffolding high quality reflective teaching practices; d) Therefore, the training of competent internship tutors is significant, and relevant incentive policies should be formulated to motivate middle school teachers to act as internship tutors.