Reflective Thinking and Professional Development: An Autoethnography of an Efl T

Abstract

Reflective teacher education for developing critical and inquiry-based competencies among preservice teachers through enacting noticing, questioning, associating, reasoning and deducing conclusions have served immensely for the beginning of their professional development. Reflective thinking and learning has become a dominant paradigm in teacher education for the last three decades in the Turkish context. Foreign language teacher education within the reflective paradigm has also been accelerated since then. This study is designed as an autoethnographic one where I analyse my own professional developmental journey as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher educator centralizing the concept of reflection along the timeline. Autoethnographies are in a way self-studies in which the processes are analyzed from the insider's perspective. In the paper, the term reflection is elaborated for not only the meaning within my English Language Teaching process to follow a career pathway but also as a concept whereby I have developed the use of reflective thinking in educating EFL teachers for the last two decades. The way I developed the concept in my learning and teaching, and its evolution in the training procedures are examined via my practical uses in the coursework with EFL pre-service teachers. As a result, this study reveals a transformation in one's reflective learning to become a reflective teacher and thus a teacher educator. Such studies, like this one, might present not only valuable insights at the personal level but also a contribution to others for conceptualizing the construction and complex processes of professional development in teaching and teacher identities.