Page 101 - Pedagoška vizija / A Pedagogical Vision

The Creation of Online Mini-Takeaway Lessons as a Reflective Instrument in Teacher Education

to be supported in their development of professional identities (Beauchamp
and Thomas 2009).
AsValli(1997)argues,thetwomostimportantquestionstobeaskedinrela-
tion to teacher reflection are what teachers reflect on (content for reflection)
andhowtheydothat(qualityofreflection).Inanattempttocategorizediffer-
ent approaches to integrating reflection into educational programmes, Valli
(1997) identifies five types of reflection focusing on the content for reflection
and the quality of reflection: technical reflection, reflection in- and on-action,
deliberative reflection, personalistic reflection, and critical reflection. Techni-
cal reflection focuses on teaching techniques and skills, which are assessed
according to externally set standards. Teachers typically look back at their
teaching and try to determine the effectiveness of predetermined teaching
strategies. The category of reflection in- and on-action corresponds to these
typesasdefinedbySchön (1983),while deliberative reflectionisdescribed by
Valli as a decision-making process where teachers try to find the best alter-
native for their students after considering several aspects such as the teach-
ers’ own teaching behaviours, their relationships with students, the subject
matter they were teaching, and school organizational matters. Personalistic
reflection needs emphatic teachers that focus on their personal growth and
the relationship with their students. The aim is to determine how being a
teacher helps them accomplish their life goals and to try to understand the
reality of their students in order to be able to teach them in the best possible
way. Critical reflection is the only form of reflection that explicitly focuses on
the social, moral, and political dimensions of schooling. It guides teachers
into reflecting on the ways the school reproduces unjust social class, race,
and sex relations and ways in which it can fight and help overcome them.
What Valli (1997) emphasizes is the need to incorporate all of these types of
reflection into teacher education programmes to enable teachers to explore
diverse sources of information for effective decision-making, and multiple
ways to integrate these sources into their teaching practices.

Research Aims and Methodology
Primary school teaching students are generalists which, compared to pre-
service specialist English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers, means they
have considerably fewer opportunities for self- and peer-reflection in- and
on-action in a particular subject, in our case English as a foreign language.
Thepresent qualitativestudyaimsto analysethepotentialofan innovative
reflective instrument for enhancing reflective practice in the primary school
teaching programme. The proposed instrument was planned to enhance the

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