The effect of school and teacher themed movies on pre-service teachers' critical reflection skills and pedagogical beliefs

Quality in education and training system is a multi-faceted issue that needs to be discussed in several dimensions over the different elements that make the education system integrated. Considering the future teacher training process, it is seen that there is a lot to do and take action in advance is required. Thinking of the situation in terms of primary teacher training it is observed that transfer of theoretical knowledge is especially focused in the process of primary teacher training, but practice and , in particular, the preparation of the teachers to the situations that are likely to be encountered are insufficient. This gap between theory and practice in the early years of the profession of preservice teachers is thought to cause "reality shock" in their lives. However it is considered that the candidates of the primary school teacher have some beliefs towards the teaching profession and these beliefs shape their real professional experiences. Therefore, It is thought that the preservice teachers' beliefs towards the teaching profession shape their real professional experience and the inconsistency between the real-world experiences and theoretical knowledge causes them to live a number of problems. It seems to be important to eliminate the inconsistency between theoretical knowledge and the actual experiences of the preservice teachers. At this point, preservice teachers having the ability of critical reflection, can overcome this problem by having some skills such as being aware of what they know, being conscious of the difference between what they know and what they do, adapting to the changes by realizing them, and developing their own theories. At this point again, it is thought that preservice teachers' beliefs towards the teaching profession should be taken into consideration. It is expressed that preservice teachers tightly tied to the beliefs don't adopt the behaviours such as thinking over the ideas and questioning. In this regard, by considering the impact of films on individuals, the movies about the school and teacher should be taken as a case study in the process of teacher training and the evaluation of the films in the process of critical reflection by preservice teachers is believed to overcome the problem. In this study, the impact of movies about the school and teacher on the preservice teachers' critical reflection skills and pedagogical beliefs was investigated. In this research, with the pedagogical analysis of the movies, the forms of film reception of the preservice teachers have been identified. However, with the "Critical Reflection Application" carried out along with film screening, it has been aimed to determime the changes in preservice teachers' pedagogical beliefs and critical reflection skills. For this purpose, this research was conducted with 73 primary teaching students of fourth grade in the Division of Primary School Teaching in Gazi University, Faculty of Education in the academic year 2012-2013. In this research process dealing with both the qualitative and quantitative approaches, "Critical Reflection Self-Assessment Questionnaire (EYÖDÖ)" developed by Sofo and Kendall (1995), the "Pedagogical Faith Interview Form" On the Source of Teaching Ability Belief Scale (ÖYKİ) "and" Teachers Need to Know Scale (Obigo) developed by Fives (2005) " are used to acquire data by being adapted. However, the data are acquired with the "Critical Tool App Focus Team Interview Form" and "Meta Team Observation Form" developed by the researcher. In this research process, firstly movies about the school and teacher are watched and then Critical Reflection Application (EYU) adapted from "Critical Reflection Strategies with Teams" developed by Sofo (1995) is carried out. For the analysis of the qualitative data acquired from the research process, content analysis approach and the encoding-decoding model developed by Stuart Hall are adopted. For the Quantitative analysis of the data, t-test, anova and the Mann-Whitney-U tests are used. With this research, it has been observed that the movies are received by the preservice teachers with the negotiated positon. With the EYU process conducted along with the films, it has been concluded that the preservice teachers have generated ideas in the context of critical reflection with reference to the questions for reflection and evaluation of themselves. This whole process has been found to be effective on teachers' pedagogical beliefs. Key Words: Primary Teaching, Pedagogical Beliefs, Critical Reflection, Movies, Perception