DEVELOPING BEGINNER TEACHERS’ PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS IN POST-LESSON REFLECTIONS

DEVELOPING BEGINNER TEACHERS’ PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS IN POST-LESSON REFLECTIONS

Sherwin, Helen

Although reflective practice has gained popularity world-wide in recent years, some argue that the ‘reflective’ research has focused too much on different conceptualisations of reflection and not enough on how teachers actually think when they reflect. This article addresses this issue of teacher cognition by examining one skill underpinning reflective thinking, problem solving. Specifically, this study compares the problem solving of six inexperienced and three experienced teachers of English. It emerged that the experienced teachers developed sophisticated reasoning skills to help themselves analyse problems in principled ways. This article identifies what principled reasoning actually consists of and how it may be developed in inexperienced teachers of English to help them solve teaching problems and so reflect more effectively.

Article
PeerReviewed

International Burch University

2015-09

2911