Reflexión, implicación y sentido del aprendizaje: perspectiva del alumnado de formación de profesorado

Abstract

Students do not always clearly perceive the alignment between what they do or learn in university and within their personal and professional goals. One of the ways to get students engaged in training activities is to work on reflection. We understand reflection as a socially constructed process, mediated by instruments in particular learning activities. In this article we present the results of the implementation of an educational innovation to encourage reflection of Initial Teacher Education students in their first year of university with the support of two instruments: the minutes of meetings and the minutes of final reflection. We intend to know the general involvement of students in the subject, and the perception of which components from the innovation are the most valued for learning. We collected 274 responses from a questionnaire, and data throughout four focus groups. The results report a high involvement of students in the subject and indicate different functions of the two instruments to promote reflection: the minutes of meetings to scaffold planning and self-regulation processes of team work, and the minutes of final reflection to promote reflection on the learning outcomes and to get to know oneself better as a learner. The conclusions point out the importance of designing spaces and time for reflection before, during and after the different training activities, and taking advantage of the help of lecturers/professors and students themselves to scaffold reflective processes. We close with some recommendations for practice.