Educators need to be able to negotiate the complex realities they encounter in their everyday practice and student teachers need to develop the ability to critically reflect on their learning. Critical reflection entails thinking about own´s practice and develops an understanding by questioning and systematically evaluating it, and in the end to respond and act accordingly (Kincheloe, 2003). 

   The process of reflecting on or in practice is looking at what you do carefully, describe, analyze and evaluate your practice. It is closely linked to the concept of learning from experience. Teachers think about what they do, and why, and decide how to respond. This ability to analyze and make meaning from one’s own experience is crucial for developing professional knowledge and by exploring theories of teaching and learning practitioners can improve their practice (Loughran, 2002; Watts & Lawson, 2009). Developing pedagogical practice is a learning process combining theory and practice (Freire, 2005; Van Manen, 1999). The pedagogy of teacher education involves both what student teachers are learning and how. Teaching is not just about doing, it is about informing practice on how that doing is captured, reflected on, deconstructed, and reconstructed in the effort to learn from the experience (Loughran, 2002). 

  Schön (1987) defined reflection in action as an ontology reflecting on behavior as it occurs and reflection on action, as what has already happened with the intention to gain insight to improve practice. Reflection is widely used in teacher education programs, but does not always lead to optimal learning or the intended professional development (Korthagen & Vasalos, 2010). It involves various epistemological challenges, including reasoning and sense-making but is often overlooked or not considered (Russell & Martin, 2019). Reflection is much more complex than a linear and logical process of identifying challenges and responding to them (Korthagen & Vasalos, 2010). Challenges need to be adequately introduced to student teachers and they need a learning space to reflect on learning and to develop their work through continuous feedback (Guðjónsdóttir et al., 2017). Teachers are not only guided by cognitive thinking, but also by emotions and personal needs. Failing to consider the complexity of reflection in and on practice can reduce reflective practice to being a technical tool to achieve quick solutions to problems that are superficially defined (Russell & Martin, 2019).  

   One way to enhance critical reflection on learning in class is applying Ticket Out of class (TOC). It is related to critical reflection and formative assessment and is a tool that teacher educators can use to collect information on what student teachers take with them from class or what they feel they learnt during class. Collecting TOC can help teacher educators assess how their students understand course content and collect information about what students feel they need to work more on (Guðjónsdóttir et al., 2017).  

The purpose of this study was to understand how continuous information and feedback from students in a graduate course about their learning can enhance teaching in teacher education. The aim was to use the information to develop our teaching in the course and thus the research question leading the study was: How does applying TOCs inform us as teacher educators about how teacher students understand their learning? 

To find answer to our question we used critical collaborative self-study that is a part of our ongoing professional development as teacher educators (Bodone et al., 2004). We want to become conscious of both the professional changes that take place and the process that leads to those changes (Kincheloe, 2003; Pinnegar and Mary Lynn, 2009). 

Research methodology helps us examine our work and implications of our experience, to think about and discuss our practice (Tidwell & Staples, 2017). This is a self-study of teacher education practice (LaBoskey, 2004).Through data collection and analysis for eight years from our graduate course Working in Inclusive Practices we noticed the special contribution using TOCs made for monitoring the development of students’ learning in the course. In this paper we focus on the role of the TOCs in supporting us as teacher educators to encourage and empower our students to embrace inclusive education. We explored how using TOCs in a teacher education course influenced us as teacher educators and helped us to observe and realize how teacher students understand their learning and how we responded to them. The participants in the study are were five teacher educators and students participating in the course from 2012 to 2019. The course is taught at the master’s level at the University and is an elective 10 ECTS one semester course. We two, the authors informed the other teachers in the course about this paper and obtained their consent. The student population in the course is diverse. They are a mixed group, some in their initial teacher education, experienced teachers doing their graduate studies, pre-school, grade school and secondary school teachers. Some are distance students while others take the course on campus. All students were willing to sign a consent form to allow our data collection and research. After each class students deliver an anonymous ticket where they write what they learnt that day and what they would like to focus on next time or ask questions. We collect these tickets and analyze them after the lesson before we plan the next lesson and use the information to respond to what students shared. We also consulted our research journals, e-mails and Messenger communications, recordings of our presentations and notes from planning. We analyzed the data individually and collaboratively. Analysis was ongoing alongside data gathering. We read regularly through the TOCs and grouped the messages from students accordingly. Some findings from the analysis we used simultaneously to respond to students’ learning. We explored what kind of learning opportunities we developed for students. We each noted down interesting issues and activities that signified what kind of attributes the TOCs provided in our work. Then we regularly met to discuss what we were discovering and our understandings.

Preliminaring findings indicate that students´ messages through TOC affected our teaching to adjust our course to students´ request and provided us with opportunities to learn and develop our teaching. The TOCs showed a certain progression of students’ attitudes and learning and we identified a similar progress across the eight years. We discussed issues that emerged in TOCs after each class and agreed that the development of a pedagogical expertise is a learning process that combines theory and practice that help build knowledge and understandings. We realized that this kind of empowerment would take many steps for the majority of students and that they were at different levels of readiness to embrace the inclusive pedagogy and to reflect and develop a deep understanding of their practice (preparation meeting, September 2017). As the course progressed each year, we identified signs in students of emerging and developing professionalism that embraces the role of the inclusive teacher. The TOCs show that students often expressed a thirst for acquiring more tools and methods for teaching. Many examples emerged of such wishes similar to the following: Evidence based methods to respond to learners with ADHD and other learning challenges (2013) Get more tools for teaching in inclusive education (2015) I want the tools, the methods not just the theories (2016) I would like to learn more about „special education in inclusive education“ (2019) We did not want the course to become a toolbox of ready-made recipies to apply in inclusive education. We decided to make our own teaching methods more clearly visible by ending each day asking the students identify and name the teaching methods we had applied that day. Students became more aware of the versatile methods and approaches we used in our teaching of their diverse group (preparation meeting October, 2016).

Bodone, F., Guðjónsdóttir, H., & Dalmau, M. C. (2004). Revisioning and recreating practice: Collaboration in self-study. In J. J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey, and T. Russell (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (pp. 743–784).Kluwer. Freire, P. (2005). Education for critical consciousness. Continuum. Guðjónsdóttir H., Jónsdóttir S. R., & Gísladóttir K. R. (2017). Collaborative supervision: Using core reflection to understand our supervision of master’s projects. In R. Brandenburg, K. Glasswell, M. Jones & J. Ryan (Eds), Reflective theory and practice in teacher education. Self-study of teaching and teacher education practices, vol 17. (pp. 237–255). Springer. Kincheloe, J. L. (2003). Teachers as researchers: Qualitative inquiry as a path to empowerment (2nd ed.). RoutledgeFalmer. Korthagen, F. A. J., & Vasalos, A. (2010). Going to the core: Deepening reflection by connecting the person to the profession. In N. Lyons (Ed.), Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry (pp. 529–552). Springer. LaBoskey, V. K. (2004). The methodology of self-study and theoretical underpinnings. In J. J. Loughran, M. L. Hamilton, V. K. LaBoskey & T. Russell (Eds.), International handbook of self-study of teaching and teacher education practices (pp. 817-869). Kluwer. Loughran, J. J. (2002). Effective reflective practice: In the search of meaning in learning about teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(1), 33–43. Pinnegar, S., & Hamilton, M. L. (2010). Self-study of practice as a genre of qualitative research. Springer. Russell T., & Martin A. K. (2017) Reflective practice: Epistemological perspectives on learning from experience in teacher education. In R. Brandenburg, K. Glasswell, M. Jones & J. Ryan (Eds), Reflective theory and practice in teacher education. Self-study of teaching and teacher education practices, vol 17. (pp. 27–47). Springer. Schön, D. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner. Jossey-Bass. Tidwell, D., & Staples, A. (2017). The collaborative process in educators’ self-study of practice. In M. C. Dalmau, H. Guðjónsdóttir & D. Tidwell (Eds.), Taking a fresh look at education: Framing professional learning in education through self-study (pp. 129–148). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers Watts, M., & Lawson, M. (2009). Using a meta-analysis activity to make critical reflection explicit in teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education 25, 609–616. Van Manen, M. (1999). The language of pedagogy and the primacy of student experience. In J. J. Loughran (Ed.), Researching teaching: Methodologies and practices for understanding pedagogy (pp. 13–27). Falmer Press.