Eleven factors contributing to the effectiveness of dialogic reflection: understanding professional development from the teacher’s perspective

ABSTRACT

How teacher development can be fostered has always been a primary concern within educational research. While researchers have repeatedly emphasized the use of dialogue as a useful means of fostering learning, little detailed investigation has been conducted to explicate the role of dialogic reflection in teacher learning and how it can be incorporated into a professional programme to ensure the programme’s effectiveness from the teacher’s perspective. Accordingly, this paper reports the results of a qualitative study examining, based on teachers’ perceptions, the role of dialogic reflection in fostering professional development and the essential determinants contributing to its effective implementation, in an Asian context. Based on the analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews and reflective journal entries collected from four secondary school English language teachers engaged in a programme promoting professional growth through dialogic reflection, the study’s findings revealed that dialogic reflection was considered useful in facilitating collective scaffolding among teachers. More important, eleven factors that support teacher development through dialogic reflection, focusing on four major areas – multiple pathways to quality reflection, teachers’ dialogic qualities, conditions conducive to dialogic reflection, and kinds of institutional support – were identified. Implications for teacher development and suggestions on future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Dialogic reflection
• teachers
• education
• professional development
• teacher development

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research and Development Funding for the School of Education and Languages [Grant number R4089] from Hong Kong Metropolitan University.

Notes on contributors

Edsoulla Chung

Edsoulla Chung is an assistant professor in the School of Education and Languages at Hong Kong Metropolitan University, where she is engaged in English language education and teacher education. Edsoulla’s main research interests are second language acquisition, professional development for teachers, and vocabulary input and treatment. Her recent publications have appeared in Language, Culture and Social Interaction, System and The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher.