Using a Reflective Framework to Study Teaching-learning Relationships

Abstract

This paper explains how pre-service teachers used a reflective framework to study the relationship between teaching and learning in a 13-week science method course. The course was in the second year of a three-year Bachelor of Teaching (Primary) degree at the University of Wollongong, Australia. The students had a three-hour class each week made up of a one-hour lecture followed by two hours of hands-on activities. After each class the students had to reflect on their experiences to study the relationship between teaching and their learning. There were three phases which guided students in using a reflective journal: (i) analysis of their class experiences to identify influences on their learning according to four categories-personal, teaching, peer and situational; (ii) synthesis of their reflections in which the students collated and identified key factors for each of the four categories; and (iii) theorising to identify a metaphor as a representation of a relationship between teaching and learning. The metaphor represented an optimal learning environment in a university class and was labelled with key personal, social (teaching and peer) and situational factors identified in their reflections. Students were then requested to deduce implications for their future role as classroom teachers. All students were able to reflect on teaching and learning, but two issues need to be considered before students uses the framework. First, reflecting upon how they learn was a new experience for the pre-service teachers and the framework needs to be modelled to them at the beginning of a course. Second, there are ethical issues that need to be discussed with students when they are expected to constructively analyse teaching and learning. Although the pre-service students claimed that using the framework was the hardest task they had attempted at university, they gained insights into how they learned which had implications for how they planned to teach.