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CHAPTER II: LITERATURE REVIEW

Introduction to Reflective Practice

Teaching is as a complex task, which demands that teachers not only deliver information to their students, but also analyze their own interactions with them and evaluate their teaching practices. In other words, both teaching and learning how to teach requires “interrelated sets of thoughts and actions, all of which may be approached in a number of ways” (Loughran, 1996, p. 3).

In order to control and enhance their teaching processes and practices, teachers try new activities or strategies through which they either become successful or fail in their teaching. Even if successful in one classroom, it does not mean that the same activity or strategy will work in every classroom due to the students‟ profiles, need and classroom dynamics. Instead, teachers should ponder and look back to find the strong or weak points of what they have done before, in other words, they should engage in the evaluation processes via reflections.
Reflective practice, also called reflection or reflective teaching, has been defined by first Dewey (1933), a notable founder of the field, and a number of researchers throughout the last century; however, there is not a single, accepted definition (Harrington, Quinn-Leering, &Hodson, 1996). According to Boud, Keogh, and Walker (1985), reflection is simply “a form of response of the learner to experience” (p. 18). In other words, if teaching is considered as a life-long learning path, teachers are walking on this long path as learners and when they have experiences, they think about and analyze them to reach a solution or solve a problem. Loughran (1996) described reflection in a more detailed way stating that:

Reflection is a process that may be applied in puzzling situations to help the learner make better sense of the information at hand, and to enable the teacher to guide and direct learning in appropriate ways. The value of reflection in teaching and learning is that it encourages one to view problems from different perspectives. (p. 4)

This definition meticulously claims that once experience is received, thinking on it, evaluating it and learning from it build up to reflection. The most important point of Loughran‟s (1996) definition of reflection is that when a person reflects on a problem or a situation, the person can look at the action from different angles. That means, it enhances the point of view of the person, transforming the individual into what can be called a reflective practitioner who participates in this kind of life-long learning.