Tom Russell defines reflection in teaching as interacting sensitively with students to challenge preconceptions about teaching and learning. Reflection requires giving attention to how each student experiences the course, which may lead to surprised discoveries that alter a teacher's understanding. It encourages metacognitive learning for both students and teachers. Russell believes reflection should be central to teacher education, with classes taught reflectively to exemplify this for students and redefine teacher preparation.

1. What constitutes ‘Reflection’ in teaching?
In my short contribution to the conference I referred to Tom Russell's practice in
making ‘reflection’ central to the preparation of future science teachers. He has since
shown me a recent paper in which he explains the precise meaning he places upon
‘reflection’, a concept that he has developed from the work of Donald Schön. I shall
attempt here to summarise his view of reflection, which is very different from the
everyday use of the word. However, his paper deserves to be read in full.
‘Reflection’ as Tom Russell uses it does not refer to writing journals or to what a
student may be doing when listening to a lecture or writing an essay. A teacher can
only reflect (in this sense; Schön’s term is ‘reflection-in-action’) when interacting
with students. Reflection requires the teacher to give sensitive attention to how the
students as individuals are experiencing the course, which is likely to lead at times to
a kind of surprised discovery that all is not as had been thought. The teacher is
attending to what students say or do in such a way as to challenge his or her
preconceptions about what constitutes teaching and learning, and thereby
discovering new possibilities for helping the student to learn. It is a form of
metacognitive learning – of attention to how one is learning as well as how one is
teaching – that unfortunately is not as common as it should be in academic contexts.
Tom believes that the encouragement of reflection should be central to the
education and preparation of teachers. This implies that the classes they attend
should be taught in a way that exemplifies reflection-in-action, thus implicitly
redefining the nature of such preparation for teaching. It would be absurd to
recommend reflection to students in the course of lecturing to them unreflectively.
This change of emphasis presents a major challenge to teachers in Higher Education.
To follow this up in more detail, see the Tom Russell’s paper ‘One Teacher
Educator’s Career-Long Development of a Pedagogy of Reflection’ which is to
appear in: Advances in Research on Teaching – International Teacher Education:
Promising Pedagogies, Part A, (eds) Craig, C.J. and Orland-Barak, L.