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Reflective practice that nurtures dispositions.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This four-semester study examines the impact of reflective practice on the self-analysis of dispositions in beginning pre-service teachers. Pre-service teachers identified dispositional signals [behaviors], messages those signals sent to students; and the results of the signals on student engagement. They also set dispositional goals for their next teaching opportunity. Results over the four semesters indicate an increasingly sophisticated self-analysis of teacher dispositions both in dispositional categories and depth of analysis.

Introduction

Most educators in classroom settings tacitly acknowledge that even if teachers have the requisite content knowledge and pedagogical skill but lack an educational heart, they should not be in a classroom shaping the development of mind, body, and spirit. Both INTASC (1991) and NCATE (2002) address dispositions in their guidelines for effective teaching and teacher preparation. Dispositions embedded in teachers' formal and informal relationships with students as well as their perspectives on teaching and learning can make the difference between a bored, even hostile student and one that is engaged and resilient. The power and influence of building relationships and honoring learning diversity are suggested by findings from a study grounded in the Learner-Centered Psychological Principles (APA, 1997). Results of the Learner-Centered Practices Survey (McCombs, 2001) also indicate that K-12 student motivation and subsequent academic success are predictably high when relationship-building, learning diversity, and strategies for how to learn and think remain central to classroom life. If pre-service candidates had the ability to identify and reflect on dispositions that affect teaching and learning, then consider the heightened potential for creating authentic learning communities and optimum student engagement. Obtaining a kind of "perceptual objectivity" can enable educators to move beyond the knowledge (content) that teachers have used as a basis for education to developing more encompassing understandings of the possibilities for learning (Mentkowski & Associates, 2000, p. 174). However, in an age of accountability where tests of teacher content knowledge dominate the landscape, the affective nature of teacher dispositions remains the least addressed component in teacher education (Collinson, 1996; Shaker, 2000).

As teacher educators can we structure strategies that allow beginning candidates to examine the dispositions they bring into a teacher education program and to develop or further cultivate dispositions that secure those student-teacher relationships and perspectives towards teaching and learning that result in thriving classroom communities? We propose that fostering self-analysis enables pre-service teachers to consciously develop their teaching dispositions thereby positively impacting relationships and learning.

Bandura's Social Cognitive Perspective

Bandura (1977, 1997), among other cognitive scientists, posits that although we are born with "elemental reflexes and genetically influenced behavior potentialities" (p. 283), behavior is learned through reinforcement and modeling. Such...

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