Reflective teaching skills of experienced and inexperienced physics teachers

Abstract

Observation, communication, teamwork, judgment, and decision making are important reflective skills for teachers. This study aims to determine the characteristics of experienced and inexperienced physics teachers’ reflective teaching in three levels of reflection, namely technical, contextual, and dialectical levels. Comparing the reflective teaching skills used by experienced and inexperienced teachers leads to ways of improving these skills and generates a model for improving reflective teaching skills of inexperienced physics teachers. In this mixed method research, the quantitative data was collected through a questionnaire called ‘The Profile of Reflective Attributes (PRA) Questionnaire’ that measures reflection levels of 60 physics teachers. The qualitative data was collected via Reflective Teaching Open-ended Questionnaire (RTOEQ), interview protocol, and observation field notes. There were 30 experienced and 30 inexperienced physics teachers who answered the PRA and RTOEQ. Later, two experienced teachers and two inexperienced teachers from each reflection level (12 teachers in total) were selected for the interview and observation. The data was analysed using the Miles and Huberman method. The findings indicate that experienced teachers applied reflecting teaching skills to reflect on their teaching in three levels of reflection more compared to inexperienced teachers. Teacher training, discussions and the sharing of ideas with experienced teachers, observing the classrooms of experienced teachers, and observing inexperienced classrooms by experienced teachers were important ways to support the reflective teaching skills of inexperienced teachers. Based on the characteristics of experienced teachers reflective teaching and the ways of improving the reflective teaching skills, a model of reflective teaching skills is proposed to support inexperienced teachers’ reflective teaching skills in different levels of reflection.