An Exploratory Study of Scaffolding Pre-service Teachers’ Reflection for Culturally Responsive Teaching - 14 Mart 2019

Reflection is integral to teaching. To be culturally responsive, teachers need to engage in critical reflection. Yet, reaching critical reflection is challenging especially for pre-service teachers with a lack of teaching experience. Scaffolding can help them learn to reflect critically. Being the first iteration of a design-based research study series, this multi-case qualitative study explored how cultural case scenarios and reflection prompts scaffolded early childhood pre-service teachers’ reflection process.
Twenty-two pre-service early childhood teachers participated in this study, four of whom were selected for this multiple case study. The pre-service teachers analyzed four case scenarios that included cultural elements and dilemmas through the scaffolding from purposefully designed prompts. The findings suggest that the pre-service teachers’ reflective thinking for culturally responsive teaching improved. Through in-depth reflection, they seem to have learned that (a) diversity includes more elements other than race and (b) students’ cultural background may have a huge impact on their learning.