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The low efficiency of the present teaching education has called for a change in the notion of teacher development as well as an innovation in practice. Our answer to the problem can be found in teacher reflection. When something goes wrong in our lives, our reaction should be to set a moment aside to think about why it happened, if we could not have done something to prevent it, and how it might affect our future. Hopefully, we will be better prepared to face the situation if it happened again. However, this is not always the case. This introspection is commonly called “reflection”, and professionals have adopted it in order to improve their practice. Reflection involves critical thinking about past experiences or current experiences that occur or are occurring in classroom settings. Take English teaching as an example. Through reflection English as a Second Language or English as a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) can react, examine and evaluate their teaching to make decisions on necessary changes to improve attitudes, beliefs and teaching practices.
Teacher reflection as professional development has long been a major concern in teacher development. Dewey was among the first to promote reflection as a means of professional development in teaching. He points out that teachers will act with foresight and planning rather than basing their actions on tradition, authority, or impulse. When they speculate, reason and contemplate using open-mindedness, whole heartedness, and responsibility (cf Cook, 1993); he also believes that critical reflection is the most important quality a teacher may have and that it has much more impact on the quality of schools and instruction than the teaching techniques one uses. Reflective teaching increases self-awareness in the teacher himself and the responsibilities as a teacher, which helps him to grow to be more respectable in the teaching profession (Hu Yining, 2006).
II. Theoretical Bases
This chapter contains two parts. First, theoretical bases for reflective teaching; Second, theoretical bases for teacher professional development are given.
2.1 Reflective Teaching
1) Definition of reflective teaching
Xiong Chuanwu (1999), professor of Education Science College, Eastern China Normal University, critically analyzed some concepts of reflective teaching, and on the basis of others’ good suggestions, pointed out that reflective teaching is the “process that the teacher as an active agent, with the help of action research, keeps on inquiring and solving his/ her own problems of the teaching goals and teaching instruments, connects ‘learning to teach’ with ‘learning to learn’, and tries to improve rationality of teaching, and makes himself/herself a teacher of some scholar kind.”(Xiong Chuanwu, 1999) He has made the combination between teaching and learning from both the teacher’s and learner’s perspective to make students become autonomous learner.
2) Dimensions of Reflection
a) Levels of reflection
In terms of depth of reflection, three levels have been identified: technical, practical and critical. The technical level reveals a concern with efficiency and effectiveness of the means used to attain ends which are accepted as given; the practical reflection is concerned with the assessment of educational goals and how they are achieved by the learners, the critical reflection considers the worth of educational goals, how well they are being accomplished and who is benefiting from the successful accomplishment of those ends.
b) Content of reflection
There are a variety of contents that teachers reflect on. Most commonly, teachers think about issues such as teaching content, lesson planning and teaching techniques. For some teachers, especially matured or expert teachers, they contemplate about teaching methodologies, teaching intelligence, personal beliefs and educational concepts as well as teaching techniques.
c) Means of reflection