Reflective learning is a difficult endeavour, found Pereira, Parente and da Silva (2016: 614), who define reflection as “deliberate thinking about oneself as a practitioner with the aim of improving [own] understanding and practices”. Reflection, is important, because it is recognised as “the most powerful driving force for self-monitored, conscious and conscientious learning and doing” (p. 215).
“Language is widely recognized as an inescapable mediating tool for learning” in that it renders tangible and therefore monitorable for the learner, say Pereira, Parente and da Silva (2016: 615), who suggest “guided portfolio writing as a form of scaffolding reflective learning”. However, portfolio writing is not straightforward, but a matter of dispute, because portfolios were originally “essentially developed for performance-based assessment” (p. 217). They emphasise a need for “explicitness of the aims and instructions” of ‘the learning portfolio’ by asking students:
- “to analytically report one task they considered to be representative of” each learning experience (referred to as ‘preliminary reflections’); and
- “to write a synthesis of the information they had learned and to plan, analyse and critically report a practical experience”; and finally
- “to think about the contents and experiences and their usefulness in updating their practical knowledge” by making use of the ‘preliminary reflections’
Pereira, Parente and da Silva (2016: 619) illustrate the portfolio writing process for pre-school teacher scaffolded reflective learning, during in-serive contexts, as in Figure 1. They further emphasise that students should “actively construct, identify and monitor their own learning”.
Pereira, I.S.P., Parente, M.C.C. & da Silva, C.V. (2016). Guided portfolio writing as a scaffold for reflective learning in in-service contexts: a case study. Teacher Development, an international journal of teachers' professional development, 20(5), 614-630. Electronically accessible from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13664530.2016.1185029
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