Foreign language

Reflection-for-action. One of the significant contributions of van Manen (1991) was to broaden the types of reflection by going beyond Schön‟s reflection types, reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action (1983). According to van Manen (1991), teachers not only use reflection to solve problems that happen at the time of teaching to contemplate the alternatives about past experiences, but also consider the possible problems or situations that they may encounter in their future teaching.
Therefore, van Manen (1991) proposed the third type of reflection, reflection-for- action, which can be defined as reflection before action or anticipatory reflection.
Reflection-for-action

“enables us to deliberately think about possible alternatives, decide on courses of action, plan the things we need to do and anticipate the experiences we and others may have as a result of expected events or of our planned

actions” (van Manen, 1991, p. 101).

In other words, by engaging in reflection-for-action, reflective practitioners can increase the power of experience by carefully identifying the strengths and weaknesses they have as teachers or evaluating the strategies or techniques they utilize in their classroom environments to enhance their teaching by overcoming anticipated problems or situations.

According to van Manen, teachers come across at least two types of anticipatory reflection. The first type requires a teacher to choose a pedagogical solution to overcome a problematic situation of a student. For instance, if the teacher has a student who acts in an aggressive manner towards the teacher, the educator can talk to this student in person, share the problem with a colleague to get some suggestion, or contact the student‟s family to collaborate with them in order to solve this situation. The teacher has to choose a course of action to find the most suitable way to address the problem, and anticipate the possible outcomes of each choice.

Second type of anticipatory reflection, in which a teacher may apply reflection before action, concerns lesson planning. Sometimes teachers need to think ahead while planning a lesson to figure out the strong or weak parts of the plan by anticipating the possible reactions of students. The teacher may need to enhance and improve the content of this planning. While doing that the teacher may also look back at his/her past experiences and design the future course in light of this information (van Manen, 1991).
Although these reflection types,reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action suggested by Schön (1991) and reflection-for-action constructed by van Manen (1991), were designed to differentiate among different kinds of reflection, it is not very easy to separate them as they have multifaceted, overlapping features. In order to clarify the borders of reflection types, looking at their temporality facilitates distinguishing them (Uzum, Petron & Berg, 2014). Thus, Wilson (2008) stated chronological orders and created temporality for reflection types. He stated that reflection-on-action can be categorized as past situations, reflection-in-action can be clarified as present situations or general conditions of practitioners such as education place, teachers current teaching practices, and reflection for action can be analyzed

as future actions via which reflective practitioners think about future conditions. The most important contribution of Wilson (2008) can be regarded on the definition of reflection-in-action as he went beyond common definitions by expanding the scope of reflection in action by binding it with present and general conditions or situations of teachers.

To separate categories of reflection types, Murphy (2013) also supported temporality and assigned key words for each reflection types as a) “on action-
retrospecting, thinking back, remembering; b) in-action- being aware, in the moment, seeing; c) for action- anticipating thinking ahead, planning” (p. 616). Instead of referring to reflection-in-action as Wilson (2008), Murphy (2013) referred to reflection-in-action as simultaneous, concurrent decisions of teachers. Considering the temporality aspect of reflection suggested by these researchers, times of actions and their interpretations can also play a vital role to distinguish reflection types.