INTRODUCTION

The education is understood as meaningful construction of own lived world as well as the world of learners. Students’ learning at higher education school involves person’s thinking, feelings, perception and behaviour. In order to improve students’ learning, one of the aims should be the nurturance of the abilities to reflect own experience. Traditional teaching/learning conception, which emphasises the importance of knowledge acquisition and transmission, in higher education is changed by modern – constructionist paradigm of learning that defines learning as process involving qualitative changes of student’s thinking, feelings, perception and behaviour. As well as to highlight his/her ability to see, to experience and to understand the processes taking place in the real world and the possibility to create individual knowledge by himself/herself, to think and to evaluate own personal growth. Many scholars (Schön, 1987, 1991; Moon, 1999; Brockbank et al., 2002; Johns, 2004; Jarvis et al., 2004; Osterman & Kottkamp, 2004; Boud et al., 2005; Roberts, 2009; Black, Plowright, 2010 etc.) analyse the issues of learners’ personal and professional development, paying a lot of attention to learning from one’s experience and the development of reflective practice.

The attention is focused on that the modelling of reflective learning at a higher education institution is not a finite process. The concept modelling allows the understanding that this contextual and situational process is meaningful only in the case when empirical data exist and attention is paid to interpretations of subjects’ experience. Cumulated data and their analysis constantly reflecting them allow students to deeper understand their learning and their prospective professional activity, and referring to the reflection results – to correct own actions. The higher education institutions training prospective specialists when developing and elaborating the implementation of the reflection into teaching/ learning can correct their curriculum (Bubnys & Žydžiūnaitė, 2010). The following research questionare formulated for the solution of this scientific problem: What specific directions exist and what their content is when modelling reflective learning in the training of special education teachers?

Aim. To disclose experiences of students’ reflective learning at a higher education institution by forming the model of reflective learning that is oriented to the training-education/self-education of special education teachers.

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