The notion of reflection nowadays is considered crucial in the field of teaching and teacher education. However, although the great majority of approaches to reflection are grounded on the same main theoretical sources, the meaning of this notion is unanimously recognized in the field to be ambiguous. This article aims to look for clarity about what reflection is, what it is not, and how it works, by closely revisiting the seminal works of Dewey, Schön, and Wertheimer. It is argued that reflection is a descriptive notion-not a prescriptive one-and that it refers to the thinking process engaged in giving coherence to an initially unclear situation. The article then identifies some aspects of how reflection works, and some current widespread assumptions about reflection, which are insufficiently warranted, either theoretically in the writings of Dewey or Schön or empirically in the observations of reflection processes.
Online education, with its genuine characteristics, has changed the way students experience learning processes. This fact led research to study the aspects of online learning settings that influence the way students experience their learning, and several aspects were identified from this effort. However, usually each study focuses on only one or a few of these aspects, and some results are contradictory. In this study the authors consider together, in an integrated model, most of the aspects identified by the literature in order to determine which aspects are more influence for students' satisfaction and perceived learning. With this aim, they conducted a correlation and ANOVA analysis on the responses to a questionnaire answered by 499 students of higher education social sciences online courses in the USA, China and Spain. They found that the most influential aspects of the online courses in social sciences on students' satisfaction and perceived learning were learning content and course design.
The aim of this paper is to understand how certain educational supports promote preservice teachers' learning to reflect in collaborative settings. To address this issue, we present a case study on collaborative reflection among 14 preservice teachers and one teacher educator over the course of five weekly consecutive sessions. The results suggest that collaborative reflection can be supported by organizing the process according to a twofold dynamic: from analysis to synthesis, and from open facilitation to directive facilitation. Six different types of assistance related to this dynamic, and provided by the teacher educator, are identified and qualitatively described: framing, oppositional voice, counterpoising alternatives, asking for the dilemma, problematizing, and modelling.
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