SUPPORTING REFLECTION ON LEARNING WITH A WEB ENVIRONMENT IN AUSTRALIAN PRESERVICE TEACHER EDUCATION CLASSES

Abstract

Current efforts for teacher education reform in several Asia-Pacific countries suggest that preservice teachers need to develop a better understanding of learning. One way to do this is to have preservice teachers reflect upon themselves as learners in their teacher education classes. In this study, students in a course in an Australian university teacher education program used a World Wide Web site that was designed to incorporate a three-phase reflective framework — analysis, synthesis, and theorizing — to assist them to reflect on their experiences as learners in university classes. The web environment included a database to help the students structure their reflections to collect data and theorize about their experiences. In the third phase of the framework — theorizing — the students developed a metaphor to represent the complexity of their own learning and labelled it with key learning factors. Most students believed that the design of the website guided them in their reflections and the metaphor enabled them to represent the complexity of their own classroom learning. Students in other Asia-Pacific countries would also be able to use the reflective framework in their teacher education classes and it could be adapted to include other influences such as culture on learning.