Abstract:

Having been treated as one of the contributing assets to the prospective teachers’ growth and development as reflective, inquiry-minded practitioners, the concept of reflective practice has gained a wide recognition within the discourse of higher education and has been widely implemented in initial teacher education study programmes. On the one hand, the research shows that being a cognitive process reflective practice is developmental, while on the other hand, for being properly implemented and guided its importance needs to be clearly understood by all parts involved into the educational process, such as administrators, teacher educators and students themselves. In the current research paper the question that can be stated as a research problem “What is the teacher educators’ understanding of reflective practice in initial teacher education studies?” is addressed. Guided by this research question this study aims to reveal how teacher educators perceive the importance of reflective practice in university studies from three different perspectives: individual, organizational, and interpersonal.

Research methodology. The research carried out was qualitative and employed the method of content analysis. The research sample was purposive/convenient and criterion-based – 12 teacher educators from initial teacher education institutions (University level) participated in the survey.

The analysis of the results obtained from the data clearly shows the significance of reflective practice perceived by teacher educators at a personal level (as a process directed towards self-development and the development of teacher educators’ own practice; the development of students’ reflective practice and the development of teacher-student mutual interaction; as the possibility for teacher educators to take initiative and make a contribution to an institution; as an indispensable attribute of studying at a university) while at the interpersonal and organisational levels reflective practice was reported to receive insufficient attention. Based on the findings of this diagnostic study, further and deeper investigations into the phenomenon of reflective practice within the landscape of initial teacher education in Lithuania have become possible.

Keywords:

University, higher education, reflective practice, initial teacher education, teacher educators.