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Coding Guidelines for Levels and Forms of Reflection Three Types of Knowledge Domains (Adapted from [15])

Coding Guidelines for Levels and Forms of Reflection Three Types of Knowledge Domains (Adapted from [15])

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This study investigated how 35 Chinese university instructors developed and engaged in critical reflections in a six-month Problem-Based Learning (PBL) professional learning program in Denmark. Data sources included individual progressive portfolios, team-project reports, and focus group interview. Quantitative analysis indicated that participants...

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Context 1
... procedures were implemented in the analysis process. First, a theory-driven deductive content analysis was applied using the Critical Reflection Framework for Scholarship for Teaching and Learning [15] (See Table 2 for coding guideline). The authors also read the individual portfolios that followed their evolving thought process. ...
Context 2
... the hope that a team environment could support engagement in critical reflection, we also analyzed the team project reports following the same framework (Table 2) as the portfolios. Although we reviewed the first team-produced mini-project reports at the end of the second month, we found that the participants mainly reflected on the mini-projects in their individual portfolios, and the first team-produced project reports were thin reports that mostly answered the questions posed in the guidelines. ...

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Citations

... En la práctica, en los planes de estudio, se observa dificultad en los docentes de Ciencias Básicas para encontrar el enlace de los contenidos de sus asignaturas con las de ingeniería civil. Para Du et al. (2020) en los proyectos los estudiantes trabajan con datos reales, que ellos mismos obtienen de las fuentes de forma directa y de esta manera están desarrollando actividades muy cercanas a las que desempeñan en la profesión. Según Bertel et al. (2022) la recordación de los contenidos es cada vez mayor, en la misma proporción en que se trabaja más con proyectos integrados de varios espacios académicos. ...
... Expresa que cuando "hay estudiantes que no le ponen interés, yo los motivo para que usen la información que les doy". Para Du, et al. (2020) los docentes ayudan a planear las sesiones de clase, con ilustración de las competencias que se quieren desarrollar, como el trabajo en equipo y su adecuado y armónico suceso, con tiempos y actividades. Entonces, la mediación para armonizar los equipos es labor clave del maestro y los monitores, aunque también la pueden hacer otros estudiantes. ...
... Con la reflexión se mejoran los procesos sociales". Para Du et al. (2020) la capacidad reflexiva se desarrolla con proyectos, promueve la formación profesional, especialmente cuando se analizan los contenidos, los procesos y las acciones pedagógicas. Según Hernández et al. (2015) el principal hábito que debe desarrollar la educación es el del pensamiento reflexivo. ...
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... Furthermore, the project reports are the participants' personal descriptions of their pedagogical beliefs at a specific moment in time in relation to the final assignment in the PL program; this makes it impossible to determine whether the PL program has actually influenced or directly changed the pedagogical beliefs of the participants. In general, the outcome of this study does align with what has been reported in previous studies [3,15,23,59] documenting how PL activities change teachers' pedagogical beliefs and attitudes towards teaching and learning. Thus, we find this to be a likely outcome of the PL program examined in this paper as well, but since we did not conduct a before-and-after analysis, we cannot be certain of this. ...
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This paper presents findings from a study of pedagogical beliefs and practices amongst early career academics attending an extensive professional development program. The research questions of this study were as follows: how do early career academics define their pedagogical beliefs in relation to a pedagogical development program, and how do their beliefs manifest in their pedagogical practice? This study was based on a qualitative document analysis of 145 project reports written as the finalizing part of the early career academics’ participation in the program. Reports were collected with the consent of participants, coded, and analyzed to search for emerging pedagogical beliefs and subsequent practices. The findings indicate that while almost all participants express beliefs that are aligned with the core values of the university, their reported practices are quite diverse. Based on this, we propose a framework for understanding teaching development amongst early career academics centered on their individual development and their interaction with students. This framework provides a contribution to our understanding of the teaching trajectories of early career academics and the intricate interplay between pedagogical beliefs and pedagogical practice. This framework may be of use for educational developers when planning and conducting pedagogical development activities.
... The majority of these studies adopted widely used theories, frameworks, or underlying concepts, including active learning (Blum, Cadwell, and Hasenwinkel 2020;Dominguez, Truyol, and Zavala 2018;Kerst et al. 2017;Vatolkina 2018a, 2018b), project/problem-based learning (PBL) (Brodie and Jolly 2012;Chen et al. 2019Chen et al. , 2021De Graaff 2013;Du et al. 2020aDu et al. , 2020bDu et al. , 2021aKarlsson 2004;Kolmos et al. 2008;Koppikar et al. 2021; Van der Hoeven and Peeters 2013), socio-cultural theory (Chaaban et al. 2021), self-determination theory (Bouwma-Gearhart 2012), the CDIO framework (Chuchalin, Tayurskaya, and Malmqvist 2015;Malmqvist, Gunnarsson, and Vigild 2008), Kolb's Learning Cycle (Guerra, Spliid, and Kolmos 2018;Henning, Bornefeld, and Brall 2007), cycle of professional practice (Fink, Ambrose, and Wheeler 2005) and constructivism learning theory (Karlsson 2004). Several researchers proposed theoretical frameworks or models for PD design and implementation, such as the ExCEEd model (Estes et al. 2008(Estes et al. , 2019Morse 2009;Nicklow, Marikunte, and Chevalier 2007), HPL framework, and five factors of adult learning motivation (Felder et al. 2011). ...
... With a systematic training design, participants had the opportunity to gain pedagogical knowledge, improve their instruction skills, increase confidence in their teaching abilities, engage in active learning methods, and create professional learning and teaching communities progressively. In addition to learning activities such as courses, seminars, and communication with experts, several institutions have also provided certificates for completing PD activities based on work hours, including Aalborg University Du et al. 2020b; and Technische Universität Berlin (Rummler 2014), which could be an incentive-based means of motivating engineering faculty to engage with PD activities (Nicklow et al. 2007). ...
... The second sub-theme of international PD collaboration involves providing engineering faculty with pedagogical training by inviting experienced experts from other institutions to participate. These collaborations include the MIT-SUTD collaboration (Bagiati et al. 2012), the PBL Masters program (Kolmos et al. 2008), the Aalborg UNESCO Centre Certificate on Basics of PBL and Curriculum Change Du et al. 2020b;, and the 'Applying CDIO Standards in Engineering Education' program for Russian higher education institutes (Chuchalin, Malmqvist, and Tayurskaya 2016). Participants in one university receive physical or online lectures, workshops, and supervision from external instructors, and have opportunities to visit other universities and experience different campus cultures. ...
... I N RESPONSE to the global demands for economic, political, and social changes necessary for sustainable development, worldwide engineering educational institutes are transforming their programs to support students' development of diverse competencies, enabling them to manage the complex reality of professional life [1]. Abundant attention has been paid within these programs to developing students' competencies in problem solving, communication, collaboration, and reflection, as well as transforming their thinking within a context of change. ...
Article
italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Contribution: This article contributes to the literature surrounding first-year engineering students’ academic well-being by proposing a conceptual framework guiding an understanding of supportive sources that foster students’ academic well-being. A survey was designed and tested accordingly, and four factors that contribute to students’ academic well-being were identified to inspire the improvement of a future course and curriculum design. Background: Prior research has pointed out that students’ academic well-being has a significant impact on their persistence in their current study, learning experience, academic achievement, and competence development. However, limited studies have explored first-year engineering students’ academic well-being and supportive factors in the field of engineering higher education. To support engineering students to become agentic professionals, it is meaningful to pay close attention to their academic well-being and help them to become purposeful learners at an early stage of their professional development. Research Question: 1) How can an instrument be developed and validated to characterize the sources of students’ academic well-being in a project-based learning approaches (PBL) context? 2) What sources could foster students’ academic well-being in a PBL context? Are there significant differences in age, gender, and discipline as a function of sources of academic well-being? Methodology: With the guidance of the conceptual framework with the domains of internal and external sources, a survey was designed based on a literature review and conducted in a PBL environment. The survey’s content validity, construct validity, and reliability were tested using expert review, a pilot study, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and Cronbach’s alpha. Findings: Supportive sources fostering students’ academic well-being were reported in the factors of personal values, agentic action, interactions within the learning environment, and external support. Comparisons between gender, age, and discipline verified the different impacts of the four factors on fostering academic well-being.</p
... In addition, positive responses from students, such as acceptance of innovative learning approaches, heightened learning engagement and improved learning outcomes, also constitute a type of relational source for educators' professional development (Estes et al. 2019;Felder and Brent 2010;Kerst et al. 2017). Positive feedback from students helps educators understand the benefits of these new learning approaches through their own practices, progressively change their approach to constructivism and further engage in professional development (Du et al. 2020a). ...
... In line with previous studies (Du et al. 2020a;2020b2022a), these results provide further evidence that PBL can be an efficient way to organise professional development activities that support engineering educators' meaningful learning across all three domains of professional learning for change. The study results also indicate that professional learning for change is a complex matter for engineering educators (Morrison 2008;Myers 2018). ...
... Specifically, individual and relational domains were highlighted by Factor 1 participants, who perceived teaching competency development through student improvement as important. Such results are in line with previous studies on the importance of teachers' learning being driven by their own motivation and engagement, with student development as an outcome of these efforts (Abdi and Asadi 2015;Bouwma-Gearhart 2012;Chuchalin, Malmqvist, and Tayurskaya 2016;Du et al. 2020a;Kotlyarova et al. 2021). ...
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This study explored engineering educators’ perspectives on their professional learning in a pedagogical development programme with the ultimate goal of achieving educational change in African countries through the adoption of PBL methodology. This study was based on a three-year-long programme organised by a Danish university through an Erasmus programme with the participation of diverse institutions across Africa. Q methodology was adopted with 40 participants to explore both individual and collective subjective views of supporting factors for professional learning. Q-factor analysis resulted in three prevailing group-based opinions, which respectively emphasised 1) improvement of teaching competence and student benefits in terms of employability, 2) personal benefits in terms of job opportunities and 3) institutional support leading to confidence in PBL implementation. The results suggest that individual awareness and effort, as well as institutional support, is essential for the facilitation of educators’ learning as an outcome of pedagogical development. It is concluded that pedagogical development efforts should consider the complexity of engineering educators’ professional learning process and that this has implications for the future organisation of professional learning programmes in general and the format of cross-institutional collaboration in particular.
... The term "critical reflection" has been used in problem-oriented learning literature to mean reflection that leads to changing one's teaching and learning practice (e.g. Du et al., 2020). In a similar way, the term "critical thinking skills" is often used to refer to thinking that challenges current educational practices and contents. ...
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This paper examines the impact of a structured, multi-dimensional reflection track of a 16-week pilot programme in experimental pedagogics (XP) in The Netherlands. XP is an elective undergraduate programme in which students investigate socially relevant educational problems in local communities and design educational interventions to address these issues through problem-oriented project work (PPL). To accompany the learning journey, students follow a reflection track structured with workshops, learning diaries, and articulated learning essays, that covers cognitive, phenomenological, relational, social and global dimensions of reflection. The design of the track was informed by an interdisciplinary reflection framework combining inputs from cognitive and critical paradigms. To evaluate and improve the impact of this novel approach to reflection in problem-oriented education, the authors undertook an Education Action Research (EAR) process with the 17 participating students. The evaluation phase of the EAR was conducted using a phenomenographic design to draw out qualitative variations in conceptions of reflection among students who participated in the pilot. Focusing on variations of conceptions allowed the teachers-as-action-researchers to gain a fine-grained understanding of reflection within the XP problem-oriented setting. The findings reveal an outcome space comprising seven increasingly complex reflection categories. A phenomenographic analysis of the categories led us to conclude that there exists a reflection “sweet spot” inside which there is growth in reflection breadth and depth. Outside the sweet spot, students either do not reflect at all, or become so entangled in reflection that an infinite reflection regress appears to derail learning. We conclude by discussing the contributions of these findings to strengthening critical, socially relevant reflection in problem-oriented project work in the context of current global crises, focusing on the role of supervisors in fostering productive reflection.
... To address such needs, the literature has suggested that PD activities should consider values such as interactions, peer learning and teamwork (Henderson et al., 2012;Kolmos et al., 2008). Even so, it cannot be ensured that participation in PD activities will necessarily lead to changes in constructivist pedagogical beliefs, or even to adopting teaching practices that underscore student-centeredness (Assen et al., 2016;Du et al., 2020a, 2020b, Du et al., 2021b. Therefore, how educators learn from PD activities is dynamic and complex, involving not only how an individual educator may develop pedagogical beliefs that support their motivation and engagement regarding changes in practices, but also the actual implementation of new ones, during which they encounter potential challenges related to students' reactions, collegial collaborations, and institutional constraints (Borrego et al., 2013;Du et al., 2020aDu et al., , 2020bDu et al., 2021b;Henderson et al., 2012;Lee et al., 2014). ...
... Even so, it cannot be ensured that participation in PD activities will necessarily lead to changes in constructivist pedagogical beliefs, or even to adopting teaching practices that underscore student-centeredness (Assen et al., 2016;Du et al., 2020a, 2020b, Du et al., 2021b. Therefore, how educators learn from PD activities is dynamic and complex, involving not only how an individual educator may develop pedagogical beliefs that support their motivation and engagement regarding changes in practices, but also the actual implementation of new ones, during which they encounter potential challenges related to students' reactions, collegial collaborations, and institutional constraints (Borrego et al., 2013;Du et al., 2020aDu et al., , 2020bDu et al., 2021b;Henderson et al., 2012;Lee et al., 2014). ...
... Relevant works on engineering educators' professional learning as outcomes from PBL-based PD programmes have suggested that it takes longer than expected to change pedagogical beliefs towards PBL, and the gaps between participants' changes in beliefs and their actual practices may be related to multiple factors. These include an individual's prior experiences and the prioritizing of disciplinary content knowledge over pedagogical thinking (Guerra et al., 2018;Du et al, 2020a), as well as institutional constraints, including a lack of policy or peer support, and student cooperation (Du et al., 2020a(Du et al., , 2020b. ...
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This study explored university teachers’ professional learning when participating in a pedagogical development (PD) programme. The PD programme, entitled the Aalborg Certificate on Basics of PBL and Curriculum Change, had a workload of 150 hours and ran for four months, involving 23 teachers from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogotá, Colombia). The programme comprised four modules, delivered in a blended mode, and followed a problem- and project-based learning (PBL) approach, as well as being based on PBL principles. This investigation conceptualizes professional learning from the complex learning theory perspective, describing it as a complex dynamic system involving knowledge, motivations, values, attitudes, and beliefs dependent on social and individual contextual factors, and how these can lead to the implementation of alternative teaching practices in classroom (e.g., PBL). Building on that, this work addresses the following research questions: (1) What knowledge and beliefs have the PD programme participants developed about PBL? (2) In which ways do the developed knowledge and beliefs impact participants’ change towards PBL? This analysis takes a qualitative approach and uses multiple sources of data, namely participants’ portfolios and reflection essays, as well as a qualitative survey. The results show the participants developed a deep understanding of PBL principles and practices by experiencing them through the PD programme, and that reflective practice enables continuous professional learning and development. Additionally, their perceived challenges were related to time, as well as institutional support and infrastructures, in addition to student and teacher training.
... Deep engagement with and ownership of the problem, real-world experience of a self-directed learning process, and encounters in intensive group collaboration in PBL pose challenges on which the learner needs to reflect in order to navigate them. Testing the validity of one's own reflections against the lived experience of engaging in PBL, it is argued, lifts them to the level of 'premise reflection' (Mezirow 1991), namely, reflection that leads to transformations in worldviews (Du et al. 2020). At Aalborg University, reflective activities are incorporated throughout the curriculum to enable students to develop and engage in reflections that are critical in nature (Lolle et al. 2023). ...
Article
Twenty-first century problems have forced international policymakers to consider how education might be reimagined so that citizens have the knowledge and skills to respond to the known and unknown challenges ahead and take an active role in the creation of future societies. While it has been suggested that problem-oriented curricular and pedagogical practices could be transformative for learner experience and engagement in education and societal change, little policy attention has been given to teacher professional learning and development within this global vision for education. In this conceptual article, we explore the potentialities and limitations of problem-based learning (PBL) as a model of continuing professional development for teacher professionalism. Drawing on inter- national scholarly research, we focus on five key PBL principles: problem identification, self-directed learning, group collaboration, critical reflec- tion, and variation in PBL design; and assess how these might contribute to transformative change at the level of the profession, education, and wider society. Although there are distinct national political and institu- tional challenges associated with the implementation of PBL, we argue that this innovative pedagogical approach in higher education could be the future direction of teacher professional learning.
... In an HE context, university teachers' efficient learning through their participation in PD is core to support their readiness to change, not only in their own micro settings, but also to influence a larger scope of change. Alternatively, when change readiness is lacking from PD participants, there is a higher risk of negative attitudes and resistance toward change at the institutional level, which will ultimately lead to a failure to change [24]. ...
... The relational dimension emphasizes the interplay among individuals and their contacts. For university teachers, students' reactions in terms of understanding and acceptance are considered highly important to adopting new teaching practices [24,38]. Receiving positive student feedback and observing improved learning outcomes also serve as motivators for university teachers to further engage in change [11]. ...
... This reveals that deep change targeting long-term effect takes longer than what this program has offered [11,13,44]. Viewpoint 2 emphasized the importance of student learning and benefits, which echoes a group of university teachers' viewpoint from a previous study in a Chinese context [24,47]. ...
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This study investigated university teachers’ perspectives on their change readiness to implement education for sustainable development (ESD) through their participation in a problem-based learning (PBL) pedagogical development (PD) program. Theoretically, the study connected a systems-thinking approach to change readiness literature and proposed a four-dimensional conceptual framework, including intrapersonal, relational, and environmental dimensions. Q methodology was adopted to collect and analyze data both qualitatively and quantitatively. Four significantly different viewpoints emerged among the 25 participants regarding what they considered most important for their change readiness towards ESD, namely (1) improvement of teaching and learning performance, (2) personal learning and conviction, (3) applying PD learning to practice, and (4) student learning engagement and professional practice. Revealing a complex and interrelated connection between the four dimensions of change readiness, these results also observed university teachers’ expression of learning gains and engagement in prospective change. Nevertheless, such change readiness was mainly within their micro teaching practice environment, with little anticipation of commitment to a wider institutional scale of change. Such restrictions on their change readiness were attributed to constrained institutional conditions and supports for long-term improvement. Results of the study suggested that it is essential to facilitate both individual awareness and efforts, as well as institutional readiness for the goal of implementing ESD in higher education (HE). In this regard, both systemic and systematic professional learning activities are recommended.
... Another group of theorists focuses on the content of reflections. For example, Mezirow (1991) identified content, process and premise as potential focus points of reflections; other authors have distinguished between reflections on learning content, learning strategies and personal beliefs/values (Jenert, 2008) or added reflections on (learning) contexts to this list (Du et al., 2020). ...
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This paper presents a model which can be used to help teachers to design pedagogical opportunities for meaningful reflections in higher education. Within the PBL Future initiative of Aalborg University, we worked with a group of students from different study programmes and levels. In a three-semester long process these students engaged in a series of reflective activities aimed at helping them become more aware of their professional competence developments. In an iterative process we analysed their reactions to and interactions with a set of given reflective tasks (both face-to-face and online), and with the research team. We summarise our insights into the complex dynamics of reflective processes in a model which conceptualises reflections as taking place as interplay between opportunities, challenges, tools and helpful relations, and with inspiration from the outside world.