Summary: | Teaching is one of the teacher's work which is the most
complex and often challenging, which requires a lot of professional
skills in making decisions and resolving a variety of problems
related to learning and teaching. Ironically, the fact is there are
many phenomenons of unprofessionality in the work of teachers,
such as teacher-proof curriculum, technical rationality view, and
simplicity myth. These caused the underestimating that teaching is
too easy and simple, and suggest the uncritical practices to
teachers. Otherwise, most studies about teaching have pointed out
that reflection is a practice which encourage professionalism of
teachers. Reflective practice became an important part in the
theachers� professional development.
This qualitative study used the theories of reflective
teaching as theoretical perspective framework to examine the
teaching experience of outstanding teachers. The author
conducted this study by way of involving four outstanding teachers
as participants. They represent four different educational units, that
is to say: kindergarten, elementary school, junior high school and
senior high school. The outstanding teachers were be angaged in
current study because of their effectivity in many classrooms as
earlier studies have examined and showed it. This study aimed to
describe articulation of the outstanding teachers about their
teaching experiences, and to explore the meanings of reflective
teaching contained in the experiences. Both semi-structured
interviews and documentation method were utilized to collect data.
After the self-reported data has been collected, it was then be
analyzed and interpreted through the procedure of interpretative
phenomenological analysis (IPA), as a perspective in qualitative
research which is based on the theoretical underpinnings of
phenomenology, hermeneutics, and idiography. IPA is an
interpretative endeavour which committed to the detailed
examination of how someone makes sense of his or her major
subjective life experience.
Qualitative data analyses revealed that there were
reflective practices in teaching experience of the participants, in
terms of nine primary focuses in reflective teaching, namely focus
on: values, knowledge, experience, completion of tasks/jobs,
problems and decisions/actions, environment, collegiality,
examination/investigation, and reflection. Reflective practices
became the subject of major discussion of this study, before the
author conclude that taken together those practices indicate the
meanings of reflective teaching in the teaching experience of the
outstanding teachers.
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