Critical reflection as a framework for transformative learning in teacher education

Abstract

This paper presents a framework for critical reflection that teacher educators can employ to analyze prospective teachers’ reflection and support their transformative learning. The author argues that teacher educators should not only pay attention to the cognitive processes of prospective teachers (how they reflect), but also the content of their thinking (what they reflect on), the goals of their thinking (why they reflect), and how their thinking influences their teaching practice in the classroom (what transformative learning they experience). The paper provides implications for both teacher education and teacher research.

Keywords:

• critical reflection
• reflective teaching
• transformative learning

Notes

1. See a detailed definition of the three attitudes by Dewey (1933). Openmindedness is “freedom from prejudice, partisanship, and such other habits as close the mind and make it unwilling to consider new programs and entertain new ideas” (p. 30). Whole-heartedness is when anyone is “thoroughly interested in some object and cause, he throws himself into it” (p. 31). Responsibility is conceived as “a moral trait rather than as an intellectual resource. But it is an attitude that is necessary to win the adequate support of desire for new points of view and new ideas and of enthusiasm for and capacity for absorption in subject matter” (p. 32).

2. edTPA stands for Educator Teacher Performance Assessment. See more information about edTPA at its website: http://edtpa.aacte.org