Can We Innovate Teacher Education Using Business Reflective Learning Methods?

摘要

Globalisation as a social, economic and cultural process is also affecting school as an organisation and its stakeholders. Adapting to ongoing change in a fast developing society becomes an impetuous. Teachers as major players in a school organisation are not making exception as they need to respond to challenges posed by the society in which they live, work or develop professionally.Therefore developing such abilities in people in general, and in teachers in particular, becomes highly relevant on long term for their education.This paper discusses the importance of teaching the capacity to be reflective at earlier points of the professional development, so that individuals can be more receptive to change throughout their career. The process of adapting to change requires not only adjusting to new situations, but also understanding, accepting and implementing into practice of new ideas, concepts or approaches. In the case of TE, it is argued that in order to embrace the pedagogical practices that they need to learn in order to become competent teachers, trainees have to bring their beliefs about teaching to a conscious level and accommodate them with new knowledge acquired during the training. The study has a qualitative approach. It presents the case study of 14 teacher trainees, whose use of reflective processes in relation to their understanding of professional identity and growth was investigated by means of a systematic enquiry method. This method was developed from an extensive research study in the business field, whose findings lead to the conclusion that successful change in opinion was made by asking smart questions in a particular sequence.This study showed that, when adapted and applied to TE, this systematic approach to enquiry can facilitate in-depth reflection and lead to autonomous learners that can make sense of the way old beliefs interfere with new theories and who are able to make the right decisions for changing professional practice. This research developed a versatile method from an approach used previously in the business field and adapted it to teacher education. If developed appropriately to complement any kind of training course, it could become a relevant learning method for continuous teacher education.