The skills of reflection and analysis and flexible thinking are foundational competences that enable the teacher to act as a professional recipient, critic, creator and interpreter of knowledge and culture when teaching students. According to Carter (1993) teaching is intentional action in situations, and the core knowledge teachers have of teaching comes from their practice, i.e., from taking action as teachers in classroom. Also Clandinin and Connelly (1995) noted that teachers know their lives in terms of stories. These stories are not icons to be learned but inquires on which further inquiry takes place through their telling and through response to them. Teachers stories are constructions that give meaning to events and convey a particular sense of experience. Authoring teaching cases is recognized as a potent vehicle for stimulating teachers abilities to identify, reflect on, and make informed decisions about instructional concerns. Articulating cases helps teachers discern that they are problem solvers who carry responsibility for their students learning. In this way, a teaching case becomes a learning case for the teacher. The main tasks of the study presented here were to: a) analyze the reflection skills the novice teachers possess, b) discover how novice teachers reflect upon and evaluate their own practice, c) detect changes in the reflection skills during the induction year and describe the nature of these changes.

Teaching cases were used to gather data about novice teachers’ ability of problem perception and reflection skills. Two different types of cases were used in the research. These cases were presented to the novice teachers at the end of the first and the fourth semester, and were based on scenarios with open-ended questions. At the end of the school year novice teachers wrote a personal teaching case that described a problem situation in their own classrooms. Cases were chosen, because they allow teachers to explore the richness and complexity of genuine pedagogical problems (Putnam & Borko, 2000:8) and analyzing teaching cases provides opportunities for stimulating novice teachers’ abilities to identify, reflect upon, and make sound educational decisions about teaching dilemmas (Merseth, 1991).

Cases used in this study enable the researcher to observe the teacher's abilities to analyze problem situations and identify the relations of their causes and implications. Teaching cases written and analyzed from the point of view of the novice teachers offer helpful insights into their thoughts, signal changes over time in thinking or self-perceived mastery, document reasoning processes and feelings about problems in beginning teachers everyday work. Possibilities to use cases in teacher education not only as a tools for data gathering but also as instruments for teacher education will be discussed.