Reflective Teaching in Teaching Social Skills: Utopia or Necessity?

Social skills can be defined as the skills to be gained to the students at the beginning of the academic year, like engaging in, self introducing, and asking questions. Those skills can be gained by the teachers. Reflective teaching is very significant for teachers. Teachers pay attention to everything in the classroom during their instruction. They think of the objectives and the targets to be advanced, do objective observations, and then diversify the methods with respect to the classroom atmosphere. Reflective teaching is among the most popular practices studied recently. In this study, the value of reflective teaching for both the guidance practitioner (psychological counselor) and the teachers (secondary education teachers) is reported. Reflective teaching requires a lasting self-observation and self-evaluation in order to figure out both own and students’ behaviors and responses. In this study, the effect of an application of reflective teaching in group counseling on teaching social skills is investigated. The teacher arranged a group counseling meeting with other teachers in order to give orientation to first grade secondary students. In the study, the researcher clarifies the importance of reflective teaching for teacher development. Instead of listening the teacher responses like “They do not know”, “They are disregardful”, “They haven’t learned” or the whimpers like “These are all utopia, here come and do yourself”, it is better to explain them the reflective teaching as a counseling action. Although the reflective teaching is not common in our country, the professionals of this area found abroad, especially in United Kingdom and United States, can be invited to our country. In order to have a maximum efficacy, teachers should improve themselves for systematically researching the education context