INTRODUCTION

Being reflective assists teachers’ lifelong professional development, enabling them to critique teaching and make better-informed teaching decisions. This axiom is widely accepted in language teacher education contexts, but what it means in practice is not all that clear. This is partly because the term reflective practice is used in connection with a variety of teacher-learning activities (e.g., Burns and Bailey, this volume, on action research and supervision respectively) and partly because the actual nature of reflection, like other cognitive skills, remains somewhat elusive. Reflective practice has become something of a slogan term (Noffke and Brennan 2005).

This chapter reviews the concept of reflective practice and some of the ways it has come to be used in language teacher education and argues that, in the main, confidence in the value of the process is not misplaced, especially when reflection is used in conjunction with other inquiry – and exploratory-based practices.

SCOPE AND DEFINITIONS

Dewey’s (1933, 1938) distinction between routine and reflective action in teaching highlighted the importance of teachers reflecting systematically upon their working contexts, resources, and actions and applying what they learned from reflection in their everyday and long-term decision making. Reflective teaching, in his view, involved being constantly on the alert to the circumstances of teaching and the implications of issues arising during teaching. He argued that teachers were responsible for all aspects of their teaching and their consequences. He identified three essential teaching qualities: teachers should listen to all points of view (open-mindedness), be alert to all the consequences of their actions (responsibility), and have these qualities at the core of their being and actions (wholeheartedness).

Teaching all the time with these levels of commitment may appear very daunting for many teachers, especially in institutions or educational systems that do not recognize such broad responsibilities for teachers. For example, in some parts of the world, teachers still tend to be regarded only as curriculum implementers, rather than planners and evaluators as well (Burton 2007); this restricted conception of teaching has been characterized as technical or instrumental (e.g., Noffke and Brennan 2005; Zeichner and Liston 1996).