Teaching for reflective thinking at a college of education.

M.Ed.This research was undertaken during the inception of the outcomes Or competency-based approach to the teacher education programme, which few teachers have had experience of. The shift from a product, input curriculum to a process, output approach, requires new approaches that require teachers to critically reflect on their approaches to teaching with the aim of guiding learners to derive meaning from what is taught through critical reflection. Against the preceding background, the question that was addressed in this study can be stated as follows: To what extent are teacher educators at a college of education teaching for critical reflective thinking in the training of students? This research was an attempt to investigate the extent to which teacher educators at a college of education are fostering critical reflection in the teaching of students. It has also attempted to highlight methods and techniques - that constitute good practice because teachers should serve as role models in their teaching and take initiative in motivating students to realise that teaching is an elegant web of alternative activities in which they engage with the content, sometimes with the teacher, sometimes with each other, and sometimes alone. The empirical investigation has been conducted from a constructivist (interpretive) approach in the sense that the key concern of understanding the phenomenon of interest was viewed from the participants' perspectives. Qualitative methods of data collection, namely of observation and interviews, were used. Data for observation was recorded via field notes, and data analysis Was done using the constant comparative method. The main findings of the study can be summarised as follows: The overall finding of this research was that most teachers still consider drill work as a means of achieving the goal of seeing the students through an examination and still use the traditional methods of teaching. Students were still encouraged to regurgitate and mimic what had been taught to them, without critically reflecting on the meaning of words and concepts for the purpose of understanding. The telling method is still employed by the majority of teachers at this college of education. In this empirical investigation, I further discovered that only a handful of teachers demonstrate techniques that encourage critical and reflective thinking in students although traces of teaching for examinations were still noticeable. During my investigation, I further discovered that although the majority of teachers know that they should teach students for critical reflection, they were reluctant to employ methods and techniques that promote critical reflection because they found them firstly, to be time consuming, and secondly, they alleged that ,students do not always participate during lessons. Teaching for critical reflective thinking is not emphasised at this college of education