The
reflective journal is a great medium for pre-service teachers to shape themselves
before they become real teachers. It helps teachers develop by recognizing
their own mistakes and evaluating themselves. Unfortunately, most of the
research on reflective practice is limited only to professional teachers in
their daily work, but very few have examined the perceptions of pre-service
teachers, who, in fact, really need this knowledge about reflective practice to
prepare them to become teachers in the teaching world. The researcher considers
this very important so that the pre-teachers learn to understand their duties
as teachers, including various skills, such as attitude and teaching awareness,
long before they become teachers. In addition to teaching in the classroom,
pre-service teachers, on the other hand, are still learning as students from
their lecturers. This
study examined how pre-service English teachers perceived and conducted
reflective journals using a narrative inquiry method. The participants were two
pre-service teachers who had just completed an internship with the same level
of education and claimed that they had done reflective journaling during their
internship. The findings generated from their interviews and reflective
journals showed that all participants believed that reflective journaling
helped them become better teachers. In addition, this study also found
differences in the content and timing between the two participants in writing a
reflective journal. From
the research findings, the data showed that not all of the participants are
completely perceiving and interpreting the reflective journal in their daily
lives. As for how they did this reflective journaling, they found their own
ways and stages that contained many variations that they developed themselves.
