**2.3 Reflection on teaching**

It is quite obvious that the more teachers think about their teaching before the lesson, experience their implementation, and question it after each lesson, the more they learn about it. Briefly, each teacher learns more things about their teaching by implementing it and applying reflection-on-action. They think about their teaching in a critical way with each detail. They think about their presence, tone of voice, activities, time, passing, structure of the lesson, needs of the students, and more. After each lesson, they animate their teaching to understand their weak and strong parts, and this mirror effect is called reflection. As a result of this type of reflective thinking, they have a chance to admit what they have done or change it [19–21]. They think about values, beliefs, traditions…etc. targeted to hand in the students by being sensitive to the points in society. There are some important sample questions given below for each teacher to ask themselves after each lesson:


In this sense, the teacher trainers lead the teachers to ask some similar questions like above to themselves after each lesson with the help of keeping a diary and then talking about the details in the reflective conferences and self-evaluation sessions.

Improvement in instructional skills should be largely dependent on how much a teacher is concerned with a particular aspect of teaching. In other words, the larger their concern about a particular teaching component, the more attention, and attempt they should pay to improve that particular component. Through an RC program prepared according to the framework shared in this paper, teachers' concerns

are influenced by their perception of their failure or weakness and their conception of a certain teaching component. Furthermore, through the RC program, the teacher trainers help the teachers bring to bear their awareness and understanding about their teaching in order to move in a constructive direction is needed.

## **2.4 Reflection on teacher education**

Paying regard to the opinions of Dewey [5] and Schön [6], the current literature gives us many fundaments on why teachers' reflectivity needs strengthen. In another word, besides Dewey and Schön, other researchers have also noticed reflection as a critical skill for educators in different environments underlying the importance of strategies of reflective teaching for learning and instruction [22–29]. These and similar scholars maintain that strategies aiming to improve reflective skills must be implemented as reflection informs teaching practices. All of these scholars reach a consensus on the issue that teachers should be reflective teachers based on the view that teaching is a moral attempt and reflection ensures them new strategies to be aware of the moral values of what they do and why. Moreover, from the point of accrediting, certification and recognition bodies such as NCATE, NBPTS and CHEA counseled reflective thinking and teaching for the prospective teachers' professional development as it is a helpful tool. Reflection and reflective thinking are very essential for teachers to improve themselves because this type of thinking way brings them some solutions for certain dilemmas, ensuring doubt and puzzlement before prospective solutions could be achieved [30]. For the teachers to undergo reflective practice, they must undertake the process of learning through their own experiences to achieve new insights about themselves [7, 31–33]. This period involves their daily practice as well as the requirement for the teachers to be self-aware and skilled in critically evaluating their own answers to classroom situations and they gain a new understanding to improve future practice by doing this [34].

Atkins and Murphy [35] discussed that when people are aware of some discomfortable feelings, they should analyze them critically with the experience in which they occurred. A change in practice can happen if they participate in this analytic process. According to Ratcliffe and Millar [36], the teachers' practices can be changed if the time and required backing on their pedagogy is provided. Unfortunately, many teachers have a settled viewpoint about teaching that they improve before participating in a program and block their critical thinking. Low self-esteem, childhood experiences, and cultural conditions might have a deep root in a teacher's soul and make them give up looking too closely at themselves or their work [37]. For this reason, to assist encourage effective reflection, teachers should be given time and opportunities to improve their reflective skills in a collaborative way. When reflectivity and collaboration are integrated with the interests and needs of participants involved in a professional development program, effective Professional development could be gained [38]. Collaborative reflection is a course of action during which participants are engaged in working collectively as a community of learners through classroom observations (live or video), discussions, workshops, and reflective writings on professional development [39]. The objectives in the reflective collaboration could be gained through the enhancement of teacher focus on teaching. According to Yoon and Kim [40], if the teachers share their teaching background with others through collaborative reflection, it will also be helpful for critical thinking and ease the duration of reflection and learning from past experience. It is important to create some opportunities for teachers by offering suggestions and support, critiquing ideas, analyzing each other's teaching, and specifying targets to help teachers improve their reflection and in turn, can have some changes in practice [41]. Teachers will learn from the other teachers who have

implemented a new type of instruction more effectively and then they will expand their assumptions and their use of inquiry in the classroom [3]. But it is not an easy process and guidance, and simplification is necessary. If informed trainers give teachers new opportunities for learning experiences such as group discussions focused on videos of other's teaching practices, this provides them with opportunities to analyze lessons that contain vital components of high-quality teaching. These discussions are likely to create more learning opportunities by guiding teachers in connecting the pedagogy observed in videos to their own practice [42].

#### **2.5 Reflective coaching in TEFL context**

Reflective coaching, as a formative approach, plays a key role in encouraging self-evaluation and helping teachers develop their own teaching skills. It has mainly been advocated in educational contexts focusing on teacher learning, teacher development, teacher change, and certain coaching stances and epistemologies. It also creates endeavors giving priority to collaboration serving as a feasible and potentially reusable supervision model in the in-service TEFL context.

Professional development needs to take place within the context of the classroom and everyday instructional practices for teachers to learn to employ new teaching strategies in hopes of meeting the current standards [43, 44]. Reflective coaching helps teachers in many ways; for instance, they can learn how to use time efficiently, how to deal with classroom management problems, how to implement lesson structure appropriately, and how to evaluate themselves according to post-reflection, etc.… Mraz, Algozinne and Kissel [45] claim that a typal coaching model comes out of teachers and coaches forming an observation, demonstration, and reflection cycle. That is to say, they join together for observation, evaluation, demonstration, and reflection on how different teaching environments affect learners. It is very important to understand the weak parts of teaching in the classroom to change them immediately. So it can be said that the teachers need to change themselves and they can make it real only by observing their teaching through reflection [46]. But some teachers are not aware of the reflection, they do not know how to apply it in their teaching environment so they need guidance. Any dialogs with a teacher trainer will help them to understand how to analyze their teaching, how to think critically, and how to apply the new attitudes and beliefs to their classroom. The teacher trainer will help them to change their thinking, belief, and attitude in a reflective cycle.

According to the research studies in the field of reflective practice, reflective coaching is a significant component in developing oneself as an expert and coaches engage in reflective practice continuously [1, 2, 47, 48]. In this sense, we can say that critical thinking also helps teacher trainers make some changes and apply new methods in different learning and teaching environments. And it is clear that this critical analysis ensures learners and teachers a new and deep way of understanding their classroom by bringing classroom experiences into the learning and teaching environment. That is to say, we can name critical analysis of any teaching environment as a reflective analysis of teaching, which is a strong way of advancing proper reflective practice culturally and developmentally [49–51].

## **3. Instruments for measuring the depth of reflection in reflective coaching**

Reflection is a key component in the improvement of teaching, and it is not an easy process for the majority of teachers, thus they need to be guided. While the

#### *Perspective Chapter: Reflective Coaching Framework – A Lead for Teacher Trainers in TEFL... DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.111753*

teacher trainers examine the context of teaching and learning, they need to use some inquiry-based practices. During the daily analysis and examination of the context, teachers have a chance to gain a new understanding and they develop their implementation. Lesson reports, teaching journals, questionnaires, surveys, audio, and video recordings, observation, and action research have extensively been used in TEFL teacher education [24]. It is important for teachers to use them to develop a deeper understanding of their teaching. But to be able to do that it is needed to use a reflective framework. For this reason, different instruments have been designed to evaluate written reflection and to specify the reflective level, however, few of them have been designed to help teachers to reach a deeper level of reflection.

While the researchers and educators have stated the significance of developing the reflective practitioner in the field of education through the years, a few of them shows us how to measure its deep, support meaningful deliberation and how this reflection has happened. When it is searched for the instruments measuring or nurturing the reflection, it is clearly seen that many of them were designed for the field of nursing not for education. Besides a few studies looking at the analysis of the varying levels of reflection are different with their definitions of these levels and it causes further difficulty to determine which instrument is the best when it comes to decoding a teacher's level of reflectivity.

A lot of frameworks were evaluated for the content of this paper and to develop our framework. The framework is based on the five instruments below, as it is believed that they address nearly the same reflective thought as our reflective coaching framework. These five instruments given below are believed to supply us with ways to be able to create an appropriate measuring framework for the evaluation of the program:


Within the context of the reflective coaching program to be used by the teacher trainers, the framework including the seven main stages to evaluate and give feedback to the in-service teachers for the process of reflective practice is given below (**Table 1**):

As discussed before, reflection is a key component in the improvement of teaching, and by using it, teachers can develop a deeper understanding of their own teaching. For that purpose, the framework above is mainly based on principles of reflection and reflective teaching and it includes the three-stage coaching cycle; (a) preconference as planning conversation, (b) observation, and (c) post-conference as reflecting conversation. The ultimate goal of the framework is to show how to make teachers aware of their weaknesses and strengths in the form of self-analysis as part of reflective practice through the three-stage coaching cycle. In this sense, the teacher


#### **Table 1.**

*Reflective coaching framework.*

trainers personalize their own teaching program according to the needs of the teachers by using the framework as a guide or template.
