How do student teachers reflect on their practice through practicum courses? A case study from Iran

ABSTRACT

The present study investigates the nature of Iranian student teachers’ reflections and their professional development in the context of teacher education practicums. The participants were student teachers (N = 41) enrolled in teacher education colleges at Farhangian University in Tehran, Iran. A total of 620 reflective writing excerpts were coded using deductive content analysis across three cohorts in three different practicums during a two-year period. To analyse the data, this study applied a rubric for evaluating student teachers’ reflections developed by Ward and McCotter. The analysis also involved Friedman’s test and follow-up Wilcoxon tests. The results show that routine levels of reflection significantly decreased across the three practicums, while technical levels of reflection significantly increased. The higher levels of reflection, namely dialogic and transformative levels, were rarely found in student teachers’ reflective writings across the practicums. This study discusses the need both to develop appropriate methods to guide student teachers in centralized contexts such as Iran and to investigate further aspects that enhance or hinder progress in the quality of reflection in teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• reflection
• quality of reflection
• practicum
• student teacher
• Iran

Acknowledgments

We thank the Iran Ministry of Higher Education for supporting the attendance of the first author at the University of Helsinki, and we thank the University of Helsinki for accepting him as a visiting doctoral student. We also thank Mozhgan Soleimani Aghchay, Maliheh Taadoli, Zhila Heidari Naghdali and Abdolkhalegh Fallahi for helping to collect the data.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.