Abstract:

The aim of this study is to evaluate teacher candidates' reflective written journals. The study group of this research includes 70 volunteer teacher candidates trained in the Pedagogical Formation course of a university in Ankara. In this study, teacher candidates were requested to write their notes in Introduction to Educational Sciences course under the four headings. Over a period of fourteen weeks, 900 reflective daily journals were written, and these journals were analyzed and classified to determine the quality of their content. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 teacher candidates. Analysis of the reflective journals revealed that the vast majority of the teacher candidates composed of lower-level technical (60 %) journals and the higher-level reflective thoughts were proportionally less. It has been observed that the teacher candidates are very interested in the summary title in their writing and they try to summarize the topic of the week in a large part of their journals. The vast majority of prospective teachers indicated that they more focused on the lesson through reflective journals and that they learned better by writing the reflective diaries. It was observed that the note taking and writing format used in this research was evaluated by the participants as effective and useful in teaching the reflective thinking. Teacher candidates should be taught directly and explicitly about how to write reflective journals. The structured journal writing practices used in this research have been observed to be useful for individuals who are beginning to write reflective journals. Through structured reflective journals, teacher candidates had a potential to learn about reflective writing and had a potential to teach reflective thinking and writing to their future students.

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