Reflection is crucial to professional development. Although stimulating reflection is considered a key concept in most educational programs, including PETE, research have repeatedly shown how students reflections rarely move beyond what is considered lower levels of reflections (Standal et al., 2014). In other words, when students reflect, they mainly reflect on the technical aspects of their teaching such as how different strategies or methods used in a lesson led to different outcomes. While it is important to acknowledge the need for these reflections for future teachers to learn as they accumulate experiences, there is also a need for PETE students to reflect on a deeper level. Deeper reflections, for example referred to as political-ethical reflections (Van Manen, 1977), second order reflections (Wackerhausen, 2008) or sensitizing reflections (McCollum, 2002) in the literature, emphasize more of the social, moral, ethical, or political aspects of teaching.

Deeper or core reflection is also a key concept to deal with the perceived gap between theory and practice in teacher education (Korthagen, 2010). A possible solution to this problem is using personal teaching experiences as starting point for reflection. The idea is to promote a bottom‐up process starting from experiences and thorough reflection leading to fruitful knowledge about teaching (ibid.).

Core reflection is an approach developed by Fred Korthagen (Korthagen, 2004; Korthagen et al., 2013; Korthagen, 2017; Browning & Korthagen, 2021). Korthagen and colleagues extensive research point out the importance personality development can have on teachers’ professional development. The core reflection approach is inspired by positive psychology and aims at overcoming inner obstacles and learning to use one’s inner potential (core qualities) more actively. As a result, Korthagen`s research supports that core reflection helps student teachers finding their personal and authentic way of teaching (Browning & Korthagen, 2021).

In our approach, we explore how PETE students experience core reflection. We are interested to find out how core reflection can promote PETE students’ professional development.

The purpose of our paper is to present the results of our teaching approach in the context of PETE aiming at improving student teachers’ professional development by including core reflection in teaching practice. The research question for the paper is consequently:

How do PETE students experience core reflection, and what impact does core reflection have on their professional development?

In our study, the PETE students (N=38) had both theoretical and practical teaching on campus. In classroom teaching, they learned about the concept of professional development and core reflection. Every lesson included tasks to practice core reflection individually and/or with peers in smaller groups. These reflection tasks entailed a progression from identifying relevant teaching situations to reflecting increasingly systematic according to the principles of core reflection. Parallel to classroom teaching, the students had to participate in a compulsory swimming course aiming at practicing how to teach swimming and lifesaving in physical education (PE). Teaching swimming in PE is usually perceived as challenging. Therefore, we used a one-to-one teaching approach to reduce complexity. Each students’ personal teaching experiences build the foundation of practicing core reflection. Data was collected through questionnaires, field observations and core reflection tasks with 38 third year PETE students over one year. In our paper, we present the results of a thematic analysis of the students’ core reflection tasks. We followed the six steps of a thematic analysis (Clarke & Braun, 2013; Braun & Clarke, 2006). After getting familiar with the data, we analyzed the written reflection tasks of each student separately and coded these answers with labels representing relevant features addressing our research question. Then, we generated more general themes from the codes of the previous step. In the final stage, the resulting themes are contextualized in relation to existing literature.

The preliminary results show that core reflection was perceived as positive and useful by most of the students. They indicated to feel more confident while using their core qualities actively, even though they perceive a lack of teaching experience and competence while teaching swimming and lifesaving. A few students preferred a more instruction-based teaching approach with clear frameworks and instructions of what to do. In addition, the students compared the core reflection approach to another concept they were introduced to in a parallel course, the concept of Bildung. Bildung is normative concept and is supposed to give learning and development in school a direction. This direction refers to the lifelong process of becoming increasingly self-determined, morally reasonable, and actively contributing citizen (Klafki, 2007). In our study, some of the students realized a connection between core reflection and Bildung. Most of the students realized that Bildung is an important dimension of teaching. It seems that such a normative perspective helped the students to gain confidence as well as they gain a foundation for reflecting critically. In comparison to core reflection, they criticized core reflection for lacking such a direction and some of the students perceived core reflection as circular with lack of progression. In our paper, we will present and discuss the results of our teaching approach and indicate directions for future research.

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