Abstract:

In our cultural tradition, which is still burdened with the dualism between theory and practice, teachers are conceived as practitioners that put in place a process actualising knowledge elaborated on by theorists. However, a "good teacher" is not one that merely carries out something developed by others, because this leads to a depleted, ineffective professional practice. Instead, a good teacher is someone able to develop a professional practice that blends theoretical knowledge with elements from personal reflections on lived experience. He or she is someone engaged in elaborating on and evaluating theories of education rooted in experience, which, according to Dewey, constitutes meaningful frameworks for practice. A good teacher does not simply participate in practical activities, but can develop a mindful, reflective approach that consists on focusing intensive attention to discover what drives our choices in taking action. In other words, a good teacher is someone that examines the uncertainties characteristic of his or her professional practices with the desire to solve them through a reflective attitude, avoiding easy solutions.

Starting from these assumptions, we can state that teacher training must include an educational path aimed to achieve this goal because reflective thinking must be cultivated. But how can we learn reflective thinking? The proposal that we advanced is to set up within pre-service training a Reflective Thinking Workshop to teach future teachers how to develop their reflective competencies based on their practical experience. The aim of this workshop is to find a way to access their own mental processes, uncovering the webs of implicit assumptions in which thinking tends to get entangled. These assumptions can be ontological (when they indicate the nature of things), epistemological (when they help to seek knowledge) and ethical (when they define what we are expected to do). The Reflective Thinking Workshop uses narrative forms as a starting point to generate reflections: to this end, useful tools are reflective diaries or mutual interviews because they are an ideal basis for shared reflections that allow future teachers to go deeper into the analysis of real practices.

Reflective Thinking Workshops allow future teachers to build self-aware professionalism, covering at the same time a more active role in his or her pre-service training and involving him or her in a more personal way. Indeed, universities must discover new ways of conducting pre-service teacher education to enhance the uniqueness of each student regarding the perspectives of personal growth and professional development. Accordingly, the Reflective Thinking Workshop is a tool in pre-service training that leads to a growth process with both a professional and personal commitment, favoring the formation of a teacher who possesses the instrument to promote continuous self-education throughout all of his or her life.