A Case Study Of A Junior High School Novice English Teacher's Teaching Reflection

Reflection is an effective way for teachers to address problems,deepen their understanding with new insights and find out solutions Reflective teaching has long been the focus and recently it has attracted many researchers' attention at home and abroad.Writing reflective journals is a useful way to reflect on teachers' teaching and to promote their professional development.The previous studies mainly focus on the effectiveness of reflection,teachers' attitude towards different reflective approaches and their professional development.Relatively little attention has been paid to research on the reflective practices of novice teachers in the middle school.Therefore,this study aims to explore the reflection of a novice English teacher in the junior middle school by analyzing her reflective journals from the aspects of the content,level and process of reflection.Based on Constructivism and Meta-cognition,three questions are explored:1)What is the content of novice English teacher's reflection?2)What is the level of novice English teacher's reflection?3)What is the process of novice English teacher's reflection?A novice English teacher of a junior middle school in Changsha was recruited as the research subject in this study,whose journals throughout a 3-month period were collected and analyzed by the content analysis method.The major findings of this study are concluded as follows1)The content of the novice teacher's reflection includes classroom instruction,student learning,professional development and educational context.The participant mainly focuses on classroom instruction and student learning rather than her own professional growth and educational context.Besides,the proportion of classroom instruction is the highest Reflections on teachers' own professional development and educational context need to be improved2)The levels of reflection mainly consists of the technical reflection,the practical reflection and the critical reflection,while different teaching problems involves the use of different levels of reflection.In addition,the proportions of technical reflection and practical reflection are higher than that of the critical reflection3)The process of reflection shows that the teacher generally goes from finding the problems,describing the problems,analyzing the problems and to putting into practice.Not all the problems,however,could be reflected through the whole process.Sometimes the participant could actively cope with teaching problems and describe the problems directly and clearly,and also sometimes only gave a general description of the event.She could also create new teaching methods and find solutions based on the previous teaching experience,while some of the reflection would not be tested in the next lesson due to time limitationThis study further develops the research on teaching reflection and reflective journals.It also promotes teachers' professional growth and gives implications on reflective teaching practice.However,due to a relatively short research period and a relatively small number of journals of a novice teacher in this study,future studies are advised to investigate multiple cases in a longer time period.