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Abstract
Reflection is fundamental in pre-service teachers learning to teach. Given the increasing diversity in US classrooms, pre-service teachers need to be prepared to teach culturally responsively in the future classrooms. Culturally responsive teaching entails in-depth, critical reflection. As they lack real teaching experience, pre-service teachers usually reflect descriptively. Despite its importance in teacher education for future culturally responsive teaching, there are few studies that investigate how scaffolds should be designed to promote critical reflection for effective culturally responsive teaching. This dissertation research examines how metacognitive, conceptual, and procedural scaffolds should be designed to support pre-service teachers reflection for their future culturally responsive teaching. A digital tool, iReflectNow, which includes several scaffolding mechanisms, such as prompts, videos, annotations, hints, and displays was developed. Two studies have been conducted so far to design and refine iReflectNow. This dissertation employs the manuscript format and consists of three publishable papers. The first manuscript (Chapter 2) describes theoretical foundations of iReflectNow and offers literature-driven guidelines for its design. The second manuscript (Chapter 3) reports findings of a pilot study in which prompts and cultural case scenarios were examined as scaffolding mechanisms. The study which was conducted with early childhood and elementary pre-service teachers at a large public university in the southeastern US proposed some revisions for the design of iReflectNow. The third manuscript (Chapter 4) presents an empirical study that explored how pre-service teachers reflection for culturally responsive teaching evolved when and after they used a prototype of iReflectNow, which was designed based on the suggested revisions in the second manuscript. Both studies were multi-case qualitative studies. Overall findings suggest that scaffolding may not be the only dimension that shapes evolution and depth of reflection for CRT as it is a complex process during which several elements interplay. In the conclusion of the dissertation, limitations, research and practice implications, and future research directions are discussed (Chapter 5).