Jurnal BHS
Jurnal BHS
Jurnal BHS
During the past decades, reflective practice has been suggested as an essential
component of teacher education to help teachers to improve their teaching from
in-depth introspection of embodied experiences (Beauchamp, 2015; Chien,
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2013; Cirocki & Widodo, 2019; Farrell, 2018) and to activate their
metacognitive thinking to identify areas for improvement in teaching
(Loughran, 2007). Further, reflective practice is also considered a powerful tool
to investigate teachers’ expected goals and epistemological beliefs and enhance
teacher awareness during their teaching process (Demirbulak, 2012; Farrell,
2007; Nguyen, 2017).
Nowadays, teachers are increasingly more involved with designing and
implementing technology-enhanced lessons in classrooms (Tai et al., 2015).
However, bringing technology into the classroom is not a simple process since
teachers need to consider the connection between technology usage and
pedagogical goals to achieve (Drajati et al., 2018; Koh et al., 2015; Mouza,
2011). The type of teacher knowledge that helps this process of thinking is
known as Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK), which
refers to how teachers integrate their technological knowledge (TK),
pedagogical knowledge (PK), and content knowledge (CK) to create
technology-integrated lessons (Mishra & Koehler, 2006).
Researchers have investigated the potential of reflection on teaching to
help teachers improve their critical thinking, knowledge, and action to integrate
content, pedagogy, and technology (Loveless, 2011). The study by Kale (2017)
showed that reflection helps pre-service teachers to improve TPACK for
technology integration. Similarly, Gönen (2019) investigated how pre-service
teachers in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context integrated
technology during the 12-week teaching practicum and found that blending
reflective practice and situated learning experiences (e.g., teaching practicum)
is an effective way to equip pre-service teachers with TPACK. Krauskopf
(2017) examined how the use of the Graphic Assessment of TPACK
Instrument (GATI) helps develop teachers’ meta-conceptual awareness of their
teaching practices. GATI in Krauskopf’s study refers to teachers’ creating
graphical representations of what they understand to be their current TPACK
and aspired TPACK.
Despite the existing research on TPACK and reflective practice, little is
known about whether reflective practices can help in-service teachers develop
knowledge about teaching with technology in the EFL context. This research
aims to address this issue by exploring the narrative story of EFL teachers. The
two chosen teachers implemented a reflection cycle on their experiences
designing and implementing technology-enhanced lessons. This study’s
Sari et al., Enhancing Teachers’ TPACK Competence through Reflective Practice 119
guiding research question was: What aspects of TPACK did teachers reflect on
during the reflective practice cycle?
Research Context
This research was conducted in a teacher professional development (TPD)
program organized by university faculty members through an international
collaborative research project. The TPD program involved two workshops for
EFL teachers in secondary schools in Indonesia, which aimed to equip them
with TPACK to design and implement multimodal language learning with
technological components, and to help them to reflect on their teaching
Sari et al., Enhancing Teachers’ TPACK Competence through Reflective Practice 121
METHOD
The researchers used a qualitative research method in the narrative inquiry
to examine teachers’ stories describing the reflective practice of integrating
technology, content, and pedagogy. A narrative inquiry focuses on teachers’
embodied stories, which offer an in-depth understanding of the event being
investigated. Using narrative inquiry to explore every aspect of pedagogy
(Clandinin, 2013), the researchers collected the data from multiple sources for
four months, including interviews, observations and reflective journals.
In this qualitative narrative study, the researchers investigate the reflective
practice of two teachers. Pseudonyms are used for the confidentiality of the
participants. The first teacher, Ani (female), is an experienced teacher with 15
years of teaching experience. She has been awarded the top national teacher,
which indicates her excellence in teaching. The second teacher, Budi (male), is
a technology-savvy teacher with five years of teaching experience and has been
enthusiastic about applying technology from the early years when he entered
the teaching profession. Both teachers have a master's degree in English
education.
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Another consideration for recruiting the teachers was that the two teachers
had implemented the lessons they designed during the workshops in their
classrooms. Based on the observations conducted before the workshop, the
teachers were also found to have integrated technology in the classroom
regularly, which reflected TPACK requirements.
Data Collection
The teachers were asked to implement in their classrooms the lesson plans
they had designed during the workshop. The researchers observed and recorded
the teachers’ activity during the teaching and learning process. The teachers
were interviewed for 15 minutes before and after each observed lesson in
Indonesian. The pre-lesson interviews were to gain an overall understanding of
the teacher’s lesson plan as well as to identify their thoughts and expectations
on the lesson outcomes. The post-lesson interviews focused on the lesson
outcomes to gain a more profound sense of what had happened during the
lesson implementation and why. After the final observation, a 30-minute
interview was conducted to examine teachers’ overall experiences and beliefs
about teaching English with technology.
The teachers were also asked to keep a journal to document their stories
and reflections after the implementation. The teacher wrote a reflection of their
teaching at the end of each lesson that served as a journal entry. There were
three journal entries for each teacher as the data. The teachers wrote their
thoughts on their practice in response to some guiding questions. The questions
were: (1) What happened in class while you were applying multimodality as
the type of TPACK?; (2) How were the students’ responses while you were
applying TPACK?; and (3) Why did the response emerge? In particular, the
teachers were directed by the questions to write their thoughts related to the
implementation of the TPACK framework in their classrooms, thinking deeply
in every aspect of TPACK, both content (English), pedagogy (multimodal
learning), and technology (TED-Ed).
Data Analysis
For data analysis, the researchers conducted a thematic analysis of the
reflective journals and interviews that dealt with teachers’ reflective practice.
The pre-observation was also analyzed by using the process of thematic
analysis includes three activities. The first activity was repeatedly reading data
Sari et al., Enhancing Teachers’ TPACK Competence through Reflective Practice 123
on the narrative. This activity has an interactive relationship with the second
activity, which is coding and categorizing data extracts. The researchers must
move back and forth to improve thematic headings based on the data's
theoretical relationship (Barkhuizen et al., 2014). Themes were categorized
around three types of reflections: reflection-in-action, reflection-on-action, and
reflection-for-action, proposed by Schön (1983) and Killion and Todnem
(1991).
Ani examined her lesson design several times to ensure that the design
worked for her students and concluded that it is better to apply technology after
the materials have been thoroughly discussed and understood. Both teachers’
reflection-for-action was related to finding an optimal balance between
traditional approaches and new approaches (the use of TED-Ed), moving
beyond their comfort zone. Overall, the two teachers appreciated the
opportunity to design, implement, and reflect on their classroom experiences
with technology. When asked to share the most valuable aspect of teaching
with technology, both of them commented on the importance of implementing
technology into their classrooms and how this experience forced them to “get
out of their comfort zone,” “think outside the box,” “utilize new resources in
their instruction,” and “reflect on the outcomes of their lesson.” For instance,
Ani shared that:
Technology integration is a way of exploring outside my comfort zone. I need to
force myself to improve my technological knowledge for my students. This
allowed me to reflect more on the outcomes of my lesson plan as opposed to just
implementing the lesson and moving on. (Ani/Interview.32)
Discussion
This study examined two EFL teachers’ stories about how the cycle of
reflective practice helped them consider technology, content, and pedagogy as
an integrated knowledge base that can guide effective teaching with
technology. From the narrative inquiry analysis, we identified three patterns of
reflective practices:
1. The teachers were engaged in reflection-in-action, where they sensed what
happened during their teaching practice and then took actions based on the
informal hypothesis.
2. Reflection-on-action resulted in the teachers’ understanding of
constructing a new lesson plan for the classroom’s TPACK perspective.
3. The significant knowledge in reflection-for-action is the connection
between content knowledge (CK) and technological knowledge (TK),
which resulted in the emergence of reflection on technological content
knowledge (TCK) that the teachers started to think deeply about how
technology usage is related to the students’ needs of understanding the
content.
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CONCLUSIONS
Reflection is a powerful mechanism to help teachers in making adaptive
inferences on their teaching. The EFL teachers did their reflection by telling
stories on their technology usage, which increased their awareness of their
teaching practices and led them to make decisions towards improvement. With
the importance of reflective practice on TPACK, teacher education institutions
and professional development programs may consider sessions to gain the
necessary knowledge and skills for reflective practices. In terms of future
research, there is a need for long-term research that includes teacher groups
with different educational and professional experiences. Future research can
also elaborate more on the types of challenges teachers face in developing
TPACK in a longer timeframe.
REFERENCES
Barkhuizen, G. P., Benson, P., & Chik, A. (2014). Narrative inquiry in
language teaching and learning research. Routledge.
Beauchamp, C. (2015) Reflection in teacher education: Issues emerging from a
review of current literature. Reflective Practice, 16(1), 123-141.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2014.982525
Burhan-Horasanlı, E., & Ortaçtepe, D. (2016). Reflective practice-oriented
online discussions: A study on EFL teachers’ reflection-on, in and for-
action. Teaching and Teacher Education, 59(2016), 372-382.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.07.002
Cahyani, H., & Cahyono, B. Y. (2012). Teachers' attitudes and technology use
in Indonesian EFL classrooms. TEFLIN Journal, 23(2), 130-148.
Chien, C. (2013) Analysis of a language teacher's journal of classroom practice
as reflective practice. Reflective Practice, 14(1), 131-143, doi:
https://doi.org/10.1080/14623943.2012.732951
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