Editor’s Introduction

EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION Chris Eisele Illinois State University The procedures of reflective teaching are very similar to the teaching performance test developed by Popham (Houston, 1986, p. 1887). Dewey must be spinning in his grave (anon)! Introduction When I first heard the phrase "reflective teaching" used outside the context of teaching children to be reflective (the "old" reflective teaching), I was immediately interested. Having studied Dewey and the history of teacher education—especially Dewey's teacher education, for several years, I wondered if teacher educators were finally going to become concerned with how to make reflective teachers, a necessary condition for the success of a progressive education program. I became less sanguine after reading three dozen sources on the subject. Dewey was there, but only in the first couple of paragraphs, only in truncated spirit, being used mainly as a totem. And, worst of all, almost no one suggested Dewey be read to understand more about reflective teaching. With continued reading, the potential complexity of what has become a minirevolution called the "reflective teaching movement" became clear. Tom in "Inquiry into Inquiry-Oriented Teacher Education," provides a good indication of the breadth of the movement in the following list of "program conceptualizations": Among the many program conceptualizations aimed at developing "habits of inquiry" (Zeichner, 1983, p. 6) are proposals for creating self-monitoring teachers (Elliott, 1976-77), reflective teachers (Cruickshank and Applegate, 1981; Zeichner, 1981-82), teachers as continuous experimenters (Stratemeyer, 1949), adaptive teachers (Hunt, 1976); teachers as action researchers (Corey, 1953; Schumsky, 1958) teachers as applied scientists (Brophy and Evertson, 1976; Freeman, 1930), teachers as moral craftsman (Tom, 1984), teachers as problem solvers (Joyce and Harootunian, 1964; Wright, 1978), teachers as hypotheses-makers (Coladarci, 1959), teachers as clinical inquirers (Smyth, 1984a), self-analytic teachers (O'Day, 1974), teachers as radical pedagogues (Giroux, 1983), teachers as political craftsmen (Kohl, 1976), and scholar teachers (Ellner, 1977, Schaefer, 1967; Walton, 1960) (Tom, 1985, p. 35). The variety is actually greater than suggested by this list because Tom goes on to show a vast difference between two of the most documented authors, Cruickshank and Zeichner, who use similar language. Now, about a decade since its beginning, reflective teaching is clearly becoming an important part of some preservice and in-service teacher training programs. Having strong support from the Journal of Teacher Education; an early hero, Donald Schon (author of two important books on the subject and two invited A.E.R.A. addresses); program support at major institutions such as Stanford, Ohio State and the University of Wisconsin; several new texts a year; a widely used monograph written by Don Cruickshank backed by Phi Delta Kappa; a growing research base from various dissertations; an ever widening debate over concepts such as 'practical reasoning,' 'practical judgment,' and 'practical argument' among philosophers; a natural link to the enormous interest in qualitative research and even signs of a bandwagon effect with a book intended to "make" administrators reflective practitioners, it seems the mini-revolution might last. Dewev's Reflective Teaching It is clear that Dewey feared the impact of an unreflective teacher. As early as the lab school years, Dewey resisted publicizing his work, as he explained in a letter to William Torrey Harris: because of the comparatively uncritical intellectual attitude of teachers on such subjects. If I thought that an audience would take the material for what it is worth, after they had sized it up in their own minds I should feel more ready to take the responsibility. But so many teachers are simply looking around for something that somebody else has said, and are so willing to swallow in all whole, that I hesitate about putting any additional temptations in their way (Dewey, 1903). Dewey continued to worry about and write about teachers' failure to think for themselves (or be encouraged to) at different times during his career. Ten years later he lamented that when the teachers who are doing most, if not all, of the teaching have nothing whatsoever to say directly about the formation of the courses of study and very little indirectly; . . . when they have no means for making their experience actually count in practice, the chief motive to the...