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Many teacher training programs, including MATESOL programs, encourage their trainees to be reflective practitioners. The MATESOL program at The American University of Sharjah (AUS) is no exception and offers the students many opportunities for reflection. This article discusses my experience with a recent cohort's reaction to being asked to reflect on their own teaching and learning in the final course of the program "ELT 619: Practicum in TESOL". Unlike other cohorts, several students in the class were showing what seemed on the surface to me as resistance to keeping a reflective journal and to examining their beliefs about teaching in learning in their lesson plans. Rather than deduct grades and otherwise force students into reflecting as per the course objective and assignments, I decided to conduct an Exploratory Practice investigation of this situation and search for a greater understanding of the students' reactions and apparent resistance to the reflective assignments I gave them. (Contains 1 note.)

Illustrates how Exploratory Practice (EP), a form of practitioner research, offers a successful and coherent approach to doctoral research and how learner and teacher/researcher understanding can be developed together. EP principles were used to integrate teaching practices and research in an applied setting to aid both the students and the researcher, through a collegial process, to develop understandings of what happens in the language classroom. (VWL)

A 'flipped' or 'inverted' teaching approach (Lage et al., 2000) reverses the traditional use of in- and out-ofclass time, delivering instructional input to students before class and devoting classroom time to applying this input in small group tasks. This study investigates the use of videoed lectures and attitudes to in-class activities among undergraduate students in first year Calculus classes using either a lecture-based or a 'flipped classroom' approach. Survey results indicate that while the majority of the students embrace the flipped experience and more specifically the in-class group work activities, they lacked the confidence in their self-learning abilities to completely part with an instructor-led class. This finding and its impact on implementing a flipped classroom supports concerns found in the literature that first- and second-year students may need more guidance from their professors before they can truly benefit from the flipped learning model of instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many teacher training programs, including MATESOL programs, encourage their trainees to be reflective practitioners. The MATESOL program at The American University of Sharjah (AUS) is no exception and offers the students many opportunities for reflection. This article discusses my experience with a recent cohort's reaction to being asked to reflect on their own teaching and learning in the final course of the program 'ELT 619: Practicum in TESOL'. Unlike other cohorts, several students in the class were showing what seemed on the surface to me as resistance to keeping a reflective journal and to examining their beliefs about teaching in learning in their lesson plans. Rather than deduct grades and otherwise force students into reflecting as per the course objective and assignments, I decided to conduct an Exploratory Practice investigation of this situation and search for a greater understanding of the students' reactions and apparent resistance to the reflective assignments I gave them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]