THE REFLECTIVE THINKING WORKSHOP: A TOOL FOR TEACHER EDUCATION

A good teacher is not simply engaged in practical activities, but can develop a mindful, reflective approach that consists of focusing intensive attention on discovering what drives his/her choices when taking action. In other words, a good teacher is someone that examines the uncertainties characteristic of his/her professional practices with the desire to solve them through a reflective attitude, avoiding easy solutions. Starting from these assumptions, we can state that teacher training must include an educational path aimed to achieve this goal because reflective thinking must be cultivated. But how can reflective thinking be learned? The proposal that we advance is to set up within pre-service training a reflective laboratory to teach future teachers how to develop their reflective competencies based on their practical experience. To explain how it is concretely possible to educate pre-service teachers in reflection, it is necessary to present the instruments and techniques that can facilitate reflective thinking and, as a consequence, can be effectively proposed in a reflective laboratory. In this paper, we present the reflective diary, the “education biographies”, the reflection groups and the recursive interviews. These instruments are an ideal basis for shared reflections, as they allow future teachers to delve deeper in their analysis of real practices.