How Pre-service Teachers Reflect on their own Mathematics Teaching Practice Compared with the Practice of Others

Abstract

Reflective practice is a crucial element of professional growth that is gaining in popularity in teacher education, yet the ability to reflect is a skill that is neither natural nor easy to develop. This paper reports on an investigation that sought to establish if pre-service teachers at a South African university – in the process of learning to reflect on practice through analysing video-recorded lessons – reflected differently when reflecting on their own practice from the way they reflected on the practice of other teachers. Pre-service teachers were introduced to the Six Lens Framework as a tool to aid reflection on mathematics teaching. The authors compared two sets of reflections written by four pre-service teachers (PSTs) who participated in the study. One set was based on a video-recorded lesson of another teacher’s practice while the other was based on a video-recording of their own practice. The study found that the PSTs’ reflections in both cases were generally at the lowest level of the reflection spectrum. They mostly described classroom events rather than analysing the lessons to provide explanation suggestions, or reflectivity. We found, however, that all four PSTs reflected at substantially greater length on their own lessons than on those of other teachers. Furthermore, three of the four teachers’ reflections on their own practice focused on mathematical rather than general aspects and provided more suggestions for improvement than their reflections on the practice of other teachers.

Keywords:

• Pre-service teachers
• Reflective practice
• mathematics education
• pre-service teacher education

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This coded as MD because the example given in the explanation is mathematical.

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology and National Research Foundation (NRF; grant no. 74658). The NRF’s financial assistance towards paying for the first author’s studies is hereby acknowledged. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are entirely the authors’, however, and should thus not be attributed to the NRF.