Collaborative reflection as a means to improve teachers’ reflective skills: a community of practice perspective

This study aims at using collaborative reflection to see how itimpacts teachers’ breadth and depth of reflection on teachingpractice. To do so, as a part of an in-house professional develop-ment program of two schools of languages in Iran, eight teachersattended four sessions of collaborative reflection in which theyfocused on teacher talk. In these sessions, they wrote a reflectivenote about a teaching session they had observed for 20 minutes,engaged in a discussion with their peers for an additional 30minutes, and wrote another reflective note after the sessions inanother 20 minutes. Their reflective notes were compared to findpossible differences. To corroborate the data, the teachers all com-pleted narrative frames and attended semi-structured interviews inwhich they discussed any changes in their thoughts and the rea-sons for the changes. The gathered data were analyzed using in-depth thematic analysis, which involved iterative coding and themeidentification to uncover differences in reflective depth and diver-sity. The findings indicated that collaborative reflection significantlyenhanced teachers’ reflective skills, leading to more practical, andmore diverse reflections. This study suggested that incorporatingcollaborative reflection in professional development programs canfoster critical thinking and continuous improvement among lan-guage teachers.