CONTRASTS AND SIMILARITIES IN CASE-STUDIES OF TEACHER REFLECTION AND CHANGE

This study followed three elementary classroom teachers through a two- year master's degree program and for two years following. All three te achers became more reflective and yet there were significant differenc es in how this occurred as well as how reflective thinking was interac tive with changes in their beliefs and teaching practices. The teacher s all became more complex in their thinking, but they differed in how much they valued this. There was interesting variation in how reflecti on interacted with changes they made or did not make in their classroo m practice. The case studies demonstrate how individuals' background e xperiences, beliefs, and personalities influence what they take from p rograms of study. The paper uses metaphors constructed by the teachers to frame the interpretations. Initially, they guided the researcher's construction of interpretations; over time they provided a focal poin t for constructing collaborative interpretations. The collaborative me thodology that evolved in the project extended the understandings of b oth researcher and participants. If the research objective is to bette r understand how teachers construct meanings and reflect on them, such methods may be required if we are to have more than an outsider's vie w of teacher reflection. The, results point to the complexity of becom ing more reflective and to the individual variations to be expected fr om educational efforts to encourage it. We caution against over-genera lized descriptions of the development of reflective thinking and sugge st the usefulness of case studies to examine such complexity and indiv idual variation.