Teacher Self-reflection Research Articles

Video Annotation Tools

While video has long been used to capture microteaching episodes, illustrate classroom cases and practices, and to review teaching practices, recent developments in video annotation tools may help to extend and augment teacher self-reflection. Such tools make possible the documentation and support self-analysis using verifiable evidence as well as to examine changes in development over time. Video annotation tools offer the potential to support both the reflection and analysis of one's own teaching with minimal video editing as well as the ability to associate captured video with related student and teaching evidence. In this paper, we compare and contrast emerging video annotation tools and describe their applications to support and potentially transform teacher reflection.

Documentation Panel: The “Making Learning Visible” Project

Observation and documentation are integral to the early childhood classroom. Observation provides the information necessary for adults to build meaningful relationships with individual children. Documentation panels including photographs, teacher's notes, transcriptions, and artifacts, artfully and prominently displayed, serve as a visual archive of children's learning (Helm, Beneke, & Steinheimer, 1998). Carefully designed panels provide an array of authentic assessment artifacts of children's exploration, while also providing a vehicle for preservice teachers to showcase their understanding of the teaching-learning process. As candidates capture and collect significant moments of learning and reflect on data collected, they develop the practice-teaching inquiry. Inquiry prepares teacher candidates to recognize the value of revisiting previous thinking to help them see relationships between teaching and learning. It is a reflective, intellectually challenging process that is the essence of teacher self-reflection (Hong & Forman, 2000). The Making Learning Visible project described in this article provides opportunities for teacher candidates to observe children at work and play; formulate questions about what they have seen; advance opinions about meaning; analyze issues; confront biases; and develop ideas for future practice. The project may be used as one of the eight assessment tools required in the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education/National Association for the Education of Young Children (NCATE/NAEYC) program accreditation process.

The annihilation of triangular space in David Mamet's Oleanna and some implications for teacher-student relationships in the era of mass university education

Despite strains created by massification and the managerialist agenda driving higher education, academics manage to stay productive and to get on with their students. However, the workaday intimacy between students and teachers can get lost so that personal contact with students, which for many years has been a hallmark of university life, has become something to be avoided and has been identified as ‘nostalgic’ and linked to outdated ‘elite manners’ (Scott, 1995; Smith & Todd, 2005). Alternative approaches have sprung up to deal with increases in student numbers: disembodied forms of learning such as electronic interactive courses, distance learning, and lectures to enormous groups of anonymous students. Meanwhile self-reflection has been promoted as a way for lecturers to monitor and enhance their practice. Furthermore, there is growing anxiety about the risks involved in relationships to students as exemplified in the film, Oleanna, written and directed by David Mamet (1994). This paper argues that in the film both teacher and student are steeped in unconscious fantasies of what their role involves that prevent either from functioning to achieve the core educational task: he of teaching his subject, she of learning about it, and the film ends in an orgy of emotional and physical violence. Neither party can sustain a view of their own actions and beliefs from ‘outside’. The capacity to entertain a view of ourselves that is distinct from our own view is a product of having successfully negotiated the Oedipus complex and the prohibition it represents in relation to the parental couple. If we can accept our own position and partiality we may develop the benefit of being able to occupy ‘triangular space’ (Britton, 1998, p. 42). In Oleanna, the student and teacher repeatedly misunderstand each other, a process which escalates and drives the film to its terrible concluding scene of violent schism when both parties are exposed to their own subjective experience and understanding being eliminated. This amounts to what Britton identifies as the annihilation of ‘self-established meaning’, which brings about primordial chaos. The paper suggests that while reductions in personal contact between students and teachers may provide a solution to problems of risk and workload, they may also reduce the opportunity for teachers to develop, through personal contact and dialogue, a greater and more realistic understanding of themselves and their task, than may be achieved by teacher self-reflection alone.

Classroom discourse: teaching, learning, and learning disabilities

This study examined teacher–student discourse from a sociocultural perspective in order to ascertain the nature of effective instruction for school-age students with learning disabilities. This discussion examines one teacher's resource room instruction that was part of a larger study of teacher–student discourse. The results suggested two considerations: (1) the importance of teacher self-reflection and the implications for effective teaching and learning, and (2) differential discourse patterns across academic domains. Wood's notion of contingent teaching (1991) provided a guideline for coding teacher–student discourse. The results suggest that feedback combined with cognitive structuring contribute to effective teaching and learning.

Multiple Dimensions of University Teacher Self-Concept: Construct Validation and the Influence of Students' Evaluations of Teaching

Despite the recognised importance of positive self-concepts inmany settings, surprisingly little attention has been paid to teacherself-concepts – teachers' self-perceptions of their own teachingeffectiveness. We integrate research literatures on self-concept and onstudents' evaluations of teaching effectiveness (SETs), develop amultidimensional university teacher self-concept instrument, andevaluate its psychometric properties (factor structure, reliability,validity). A multitrait-multimethod analysis of relations betweenmultiple dimensions of teacher self-concept and corresponding SET ratingdimensions provides good support for the construct validity of teacherself-concept responses. In support of a priori hypotheses based onself-concept theory, agreement between teacher self-concepts and SETswas moderate (median r = 0.20) for teachers who had notpreviously received SET feedback, but substantially higher (median r= 0.40) for teachers who had previously received SET feedback.Implications for further research on teacher self-reflection and forimproving teaching effectiveness in higher education arediscussed.

Self-portrait: A tool for understanding the teaching of mathematics

In a course labelled “math methods” for preservice elementary school teachers, the focus is on constructivist philosophy and teaching as synonymous with research. The participants consciously view themselves as teacher-learners by continuously looking at their perception of self in a set of written responses: “Self-portrait as a Teacher.” Three of these self-reflections are collected over ten weeks. The data show that the initial stage is a general, often vague, perception and description of a mathematics teacher, reflecting the media portrayal of the necessity of mathematics in schools, followed by confusion and frustration of not knowing mathematics in sufficient depth to explain it to others. The final portrait shows some resolution of conflict and self-discovery in “doing” mathematics. In all, the practice of self-regulation becomes progressively more evident. Although teaching is acknowledged as a reflective practice, ways of facilitating the self reflection of preservice teachers are not widely known. The use of self-portraits brings out the profile of a learner, which helps provide individual and group preparation, and assists in building a learning community of teachers.