One of the innovations introduced by the Turkish Century Education Model is teacher reflection. Teacher reflection is the process of continuously improving educators' course content, teaching methods and classroom experiences through self-assessment, analysis and peer feedback. The aim is to improve education by identifying strengths/weaknesses, provide more effective learning experiences, and support professional development by using reflective thinking skills. [1]
The main practices related to teacher reflections can be listed as follows;
Daily/Weekly Reflection Logs: Teachers taking notes at the end of the day on how the lesson went, what worked and what didn't.
Lesson Observation and Analysis: Colleagues observe each other's lessons and give feedback based on these observations.
Student Feedback Sessions: Obtaining and evaluating the opinions of the students directly about the teaching of the course.
List of Reflective Questions: “Questioning the lesson with questions such as ”What went well in the lesson?“, ”What was the most challenging part?“, ”Were the students at the center of the class discussion?".
Reflection in Action: Analyzing a situation during or immediately after a lesson and making instant adjustments to the teaching method.
Videotaping Yourself: It's not very easy in practice, but from time to time you can videotape yourself and watch it.
Writing a blog : Posting opinions, thoughts and reflections about daily classroom experiences on the blog.
Setting a critical threshold: Setting a threshold for the academic, social, emotional, sporting skills of the class.
The main purpose of reflection is to support teacher and teaching development. Through reflection, teachers are expected to evaluate both their own strengths and the strengths of the curriculum and the aspects of the curriculum that need improvement.
Teachers can accordingly improve the teaching process and provide students with better learning experiences.
Although teaching-learning processes are generally thought to take place in the classroom, teachers can also use the feedback they receive from stakeholders such as school administrators, teachers, students, parents and academics with whom they interact while reflecting.
Data sources such as interview forms, self-assessment forms, anecdotal records, journals, purposeful discussions, reports of the committee of teachers, development files, micro-teaching evaluations and lesson reports can be used for teacher reflections.
Almost two academic years have passed since the implementation of the TCC. At this stage, when our colleagues evaluate themselves, they have certainly done some work on teacher reflection practices in the classroom, but when they question which of the data sources such as interview forms, self-evaluation forms, anecdotal records, diaries, purposeful discussions, reports of the committee of teachers and branch teachers, reports of the board of teachers, development files, micro-teaching evaluations and lesson reports they have used, it will be seen that the result is not encouraging at all.
In this sense, we cannot say that teacher reflections, one of the innovations thought to have been introduced with the Turkish Century Education Model, have been realized.
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- Aysun Yagci Reflective Teacher ↑