Abstract:

The concept of reflective practice has gained its recognition within the discourse of teacher education and is widely acknowledged as an essential component in the professional development of student teachers. The capacity to reflect is regarded as one of the main generic competences and is of high importance in the context of pre-service teacher education, since it encompasses the need for student teachers not only to be able to reflect on their learning process while acquiring their professional knowledge, but is also directly related to their future careers. The need for the concept of reflective practice to be embedded in study programmes of pre-service teacher education is supported by the implementation of student-centered based learning, the concept underlying the new approach more and more higher education institutions are adopting nowadays. Thorough examination of both concepts has resulted in the assumption that they correlate to a great extent and are interdependent: reflection on practice is a prerequisite for the quality of the new teaching/learning process. The aim of the current presentation is to share the insights obtained from an in-depth analysis on how the concept of reflective practice is manifested in the student-centered studies of pre-service teachers‘ higher education. The ultimate goal of this paper is to contribute to the understanding that proper implementation of the reflective practice concept in student-centered studies is of vital importance in the context of pre-service teacher education since it enables to achieve one of the most important goals of higher education - to develop students’ ability to learn continuously, reflecting on one’s experience, in order to develop prospective specialists’ holistic competence.

Keywords:

Higher education, pre-service teacher education, reflective practice, student-centered learning.