Reflective thinking tendencies of classroom teachers

It is now a necessity for teachers to constantly question their own teaching methods in order to develop their professional skills, reach their career goals, raise individuals required by the age, and to take their teaching skills one step further by determining the positive and negative situations they experience in the teaching process. At this point, the concepts of "reflection" and "reflective thinking" emerged. In the study, it was aimed to determine the reflective thinking tendencies of primary school teachers. For this purpose, mixed method was used and it was determined whether the reflective thinking dispositions of the teachers made a difference according to the variables of gender, seniority, education level and class size. Since the research is a mixed-patterned research, qualitative data were also obtained to support the quantitative study. The study population of the research consists of 12320 classroom teachers working in 379 primary schools operating in the 2021-2022 academic year in 14 districts located on the Anatolian side of Istanbul. The sample of the study was determined using the stratified sampling method. The schools in the universe are divided into homogeneous subgroups. Samples from the determined substrates were selected by random sampling method. The sample of the study consists of 390 classroom teachers working in 40 primary schools in two different layers. In the research, "Personal Information", "Reflective Thinking Tendency Scale for Teachers and Teacher Candidates (YANDE)" developed by Semerci (2007) and "Metaphor Determination Form" developed by the researcher were used as data collection tools. Kruskal Wallis and Mann Whitney U difference tests, which are non-parametric tests, were used as statistical techniques in the research. Qualitative data were analyzed by content analysis method. As a result of the research, it was found that the reflective thinking dispositions of the classroom teachers were sufficient. When the findings were examined, it was understood that teachers tended to think reflectively about valuing the opinions of their students the most. In the study, it was found that the scores of the teachers from the YANDE scale did not reveal a significant difference according to the variables of gender, seniority and education level; It was concluded that there was a significant difference only in the "continuous and purposeful thinking" sub-dimension according to the class size variable. According to this; it can be said that the reflective thinking tendency levels of the teachers with a small class size are higher than the teachers with a large number of classrooms. In the qualitative dimension of the research; 236 valid metaphors related to the concept of "reflective teacher" were obtained. Since some metaphors were expressed more than once, 90 different metaphors were produced. These metaphors were collected in 16 different categories. The metaphors and categories developed by the teachers were determined and compared with the quantitative findings. The results obtained from the research were presented within the framework of the literature and suggestions were developed. Keywords: Reflective Thinking, teacher, metaphor