Search results

This chapter analyzes one teacher educator’s development of a pedagogy of reflection over a period of 25 years. My personal interpretation of the meaning of reflective practice leads to seven principles of a pedagogy of reflection that focus on relationship, listening, metacognition, modeling, and learning from experience. Justification of my pedagogy of reflection includes an account of books that influenced my development as a teacher educator and the insights gained from living and teaching in a different culture. Excerpts from and discussion of the work of two preservice teachers illustrate my pedagogy of reflection and emphasize the importance of replying supportively to each individual who shows awareness of the unique learning process involved in becoming a teacher. The research methodology of Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices supported the development of my pedagogy of reflection and helped me to overcome the conditions that can constrain that development.

This chapter discusses a form of pedagogy of reflection suggested to be defined as the dialogical-reflective professional-development school (DRPDS) – a framework that develops and empowers students by engaging them in a process of continual improvement, responding to diverse situations, providing stimuli for learning, and giving anchors for mediation. The pedagogy of reflection relates to dialogue not only from a theoretical historical context but also by way of example – that is, it offers empowering dialogues within the traditional teacher-training framework. This chapter outlines the importance of the pedagogy of reflection in the multicultural educational space of the preservice education field in Israel, analyzing the first university PDS model. The pedagogy of reflection in the context of the educational dialogue of educators is outlined as a tool for student empowerment, achieved through a community of learners who dedicate space to the development of their whole personality within the profession, taking a moral stance toward the educational discourse, minimizing judgmentalism and prejudice, creating national/gender equality with the goal of examining the fundamental question of educational performance, and reinforcing their sense of organizational belonging within the system. In these contexts, the chapter is based on the elements of dialogical philosophy exemplified in the thought of Burbules, Nelson, Isaacs, Bohm, and Heckmann and the reflective basis of educational and organizational performance exemplified in the writings of van Manen. The chapter also presents two examples from a project in which teaching units based on dialogue and reflection were developed within a dialogic community that represents in its very being collective empowerment, the possibility of coping with problems that are too large for an individual to solve on his/her own, and an alternative to sealed and alienated organizations.

Purpose – This chapter provides the reader with an overview of a reflective video pedagogy for use within a literacy center or within professional development contexts. The conceptual overview is followed by two-case examples that reveal how literacy centers can serve as rich, productive research sites for the use and study of reflective video pedagogy.

Methodology/approach – The authors describe their ongoing work to develop and integrate a reflective video pedagogy within a literacy center during a 15-week practicum for literacy-specialists-in-training. The reflective video pedagogy is not only used by the clinicians who work with struggling readers twice a week, but it is also used by the researchers at the literacy center who study the reflective video pedagogy through the same video the clinicians use.

Practical implications – Literacy centers are dynamic sites where children, families, pre/in-service teachers, and teacher educators work together around literacy development. Reflective video pedagogies can be used to closely examine learning and teaching for adult students (i.e., clinicians) and for youth (i.e., children in elementary, middle, and high school) and also for parents who want their children to find success with literacy.

Research implications – In recent years “scaling up” and “scientific research” have come to dominate much of the literacy research landscape. While we see the value and necessity of large-scale experimental studies, we also posit that literacy centers have a unique role to play. Given that resources are scarce, literacy scholars must maximize the affordances of literacy centers as rich, productive research sites for the use and study of a reflective video pedagogy.

This chapter calls attention to how creating a digital story, which focused on teaching and learning spaces for writing, served as a mediational tool to support preservice teachers’ reflective practice and understanding of writing and the writing process.

Data from over 50 students were parsed using Kember, McKay, Sinclair and Wong’s (2008) approach to determine levels of reflection. From the students whose work fell into the reflection-to-critical reflection range, we selected three students from different disciplines and adopted a case study approach for analyzing and discussing their work. Students’ informal and formal reflections and learning artifacts, as well as researcher field notes, contributed to a rich understanding of each case.

Review of students’ digital stories and related artifacts (i.e., storyboards, scripts, and reflections), as well as other course-related work, revealed that digital storytelling facilitated students’ developing understanding in three dimensions: writing, pedagogy, and reflective practice.

The findings suggest that digital storytelling can engage students in multimodal iterative practices analogous to the writing process that cultivates reflective thinking. Activities that scaffold such iteration and cross-literate practices can foster reflective thinking about inspired pedagogy within and beyond the classroom.

In this chapter, Cheryl Craig and Lily Orland-Barak, editors of International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A), expound on the traveling pedagogies theme as well as the theory–practice chasm, and conclude the edited volume with a model capturing the nature of fruitful, contextualized international pedagogies. Throughout the discussion, they highlight connections between and among potentially promising pedagogical approaches documented by the contributing authors whose countries of origins differ. As authors of this chapter and editors of this book, they claim that promising pedagogies have the potential to “travel” to other locales if their conditions of enactment are locally grounded, deliberated, and elaborated. This contextualization adds to the fluidity of knowledge mobilization to contexts different from the original one. Furthermore, all of the pedagogies have a praxical character to them, which means they strive to achieve a dialectical relationship between theory and practice. At the same time, they address local complexities in a reflective, deliberative, and evidence-based manner while acknowledging connections/contradictions in discourses and daunting policy issues/constraints/agendas. Against this “messy” backdrop, a model for traveling international pedagogies is proposed. The model balances a plethora of complexities, on the one hand, with the seemingly universal demand for uniformity, on the other hand. Through ongoing local, national, and international deliberation and negotiation, quality international pedagogies of potential use and value become readied for “travel”.

Part A of the three-book series on International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies focused on pedagogies of teacher selection, reflection, narrative ways of knowing, identity, and mentoring/mediation, while Part B of the three-volume set centered on pedagogies of preservice teacher leadership, diversity, parents/family, social justice, and technology. In this book, Part C of the trilogy, pedagogies of multimodalities, partnerships/communities, and teacher assessment are presented, along with vehicles for teacher education research and dissemination. To end the trilogy of books, ideas having to with traveling stories (Olson & Craig, 2009), the theory-practice split, and the praxical nature of pedagogies are summarized. Sustainability, hope, and the future are also discussed. A Traveling Pedagogies figure, with input from all of the chapters in the three-volume set, is presented to conclude the International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies series.

The theory-practice problem manifests itself in education generally and in teacher education specifically. The divide is evident in diverse literatures internationally. The theory-practice split, which is one of many expressions used to describe the phenomenon, cannot be apprehended in a material sense. Instead, it emerges as a perennial problem that educators live through the stories they tell of their lives. This chapter particularly captures the struggle over rigor versus relevance in teacher education. It offers five different categories of pedagogies (teacher leadership, diversity, family, social justice, and technology), which together comprise this volume, International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part B). These five pedagogies join five earlier categories of pedagogies (teacher selection, reflection, narrative knowing, teacher identity, and mediation and mentoring), which are found in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part A), and a new lineup of promising teacher education pedagogies that will appear in International Teacher Education: Promising Pedagogies (Part C). In all cases, the featured international pedagogies are not recipes to follow. Rather, they are contextualized artifacts that produce a synergy between teaching and learning and show promise where international transferability is concerned.

This chapter introduces the theory–practice divide through surveying highly diverse sources of literature that document its existence and call for ways in which it can be overcome. After that, gaps between theory and practice as they appear in the field of education are foregrounded and presented as a challenge, particularly in the Western teacher education enterprise. The authors contend that the gap between theory and practice can be addressed nationally and internationally through focusing on pedagogies that are locally deliberated and enacted. Such pedagogies would be specifically named by teacher educators; the origins (cultural/practical/theoretical/policy roots) of the pedagogies would be traced; and live, evidence-based exemplars of the pedagogies unfurling in their home settings would be presented from an insider point of view. Through this approach, promising pedagogies with potential portability to other national and international contexts would be made known. In this manner, a dialectical relationship between theory and practice – where each speaks productively to the other – would be established. This relationship, the authors reinforce, would need to be continually negotiated when the enactment of the promising pedagogies is attempted in different settings and/or at different junctures of time.

In this chapter, we present Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices (S-STEP) as a research methodology that can be used pedagogically to explore the practices of teacher educators for their professional development. It can be seen as a pedagogic practice that enlists reflection to enable teacher educators to explore and explicate practice and make explicit what they know about teaching and teacher education in order to improve practice and contribute to larger conversations in research on teaching and teacher education. After providing a succinct interpretation of the origins of S-STEP work, we suggest that historical context, along with the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings, makes it viable as a research methodology and a potentially valuable pedagogy for teacher education research. S-STEP is an intimate research methodology (Hamilton, 1995) in which the person conducting the research is both the focus and the author of the research and provides an insider’s perspective into practice and experience.

We provide examples to demonstrate how others and we take up S-STEP as pedagogy for teacher educator professional development that allows us to grapple with what we know either explicitly or tacitly from and about our practice. International S-STEP research has the power to inform the professional development of teacher educators across these boundaries, because it attends carefully to the particular of the practice and context from which it emerged.

There exists a variety of programs designed to prepare future leaders. In the arena of graduate programs in leadership, the International Leadership Association (2020) provides over 350 programs in their database. Guthrie and Jenkins (2018) have outlined dozens of strategies for leadership education that are utilized in degree programs. As such, there exists a need for informed choices when experiential learning pedagogies are incorporated in leadership education curriculum. One methodology, known as case-in-point, was designed at the Harvard Kennedy School to teach adaptive leadership (Heifetz & Linsky, 2017). There lacks empirical research in demonstrating the effectiveness and impact of case-in-point pedagogy. This qualitative study explored the perceived impact of 12 alumni who took a case-in-point course embedded in a leadership master’s program across a decade. Alumni’s retrospective experiences were collected to understand the impact the course had on them during the time they were in their leadership program and the impact of the learning for their professional lives. Key themes that emerged from the participants included increased levels of awareness in race and power dynamics, an increased use of self-as-instrument, awareness of relationships to authority, and shifts in views of leadership. All participants viewed the case-in point pedagogy as powerful or positive after having graduated from the program despite many recollections of mixed or negative experiences during their time in the course/s. Implications of the findings suggest important considerations relating to scaffolding and proper processing to enhance or improve outcomes for case-in-point pedagogy designed to enhance leadership ability.