Nurturing EFL Pre-Service Teachers in Indonesia to Become Reflective Practitioners

Reflective practice is an indispensable component of language teaching as improvement begins with reflection. For this reason, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology in Indonesia includes reflective competence as one of the abilities that teachers must develop, and teacher education programmes in universities follow this up by fostering the reflection of pre-service teachers. This chapter offers a detailed account of the efforts of the teacher education programme at the State University of Surabaya (Unesa) to develop reflective practice among pre-service teachers within the framework of Schön’s reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. To accomplish this task, the teacher education programme integrates reflection into various activities, but this chapter focuses on modelling action research, project-based learning, materials development, extensive reading, the on-campus teaching practicum, and student teaching at schools. Some challenges occur in the attempt to integrate reflective practice in these ways. Personal and contextual factors may hamper the pre-service teachers’ efforts to engage in reflection, but teacher educators also have procedures to overcome these challenges and optimize the huge benefits of reflective practice. Based on this account of reflective practice, some future directions are presented. The concept of reflection should be introduced to the pre-service teachers early in the orientation days and recommended as a topic for their academic papers or theses. Additionally, novice teacher educators should be trained to be more reflective through workshops so they can be good models for the teacher trainees.