ABSTRACT
The pursuit of reflective educational practitioners, and the prozelytization of action research, hotted up during the 1980s and has continued into the 1990s, at least among teacher educators. The development of reflective practice as an aim attached itself to initial (pre-service) teacher education (see MOTE Report, 1991), in Britain, mainland Europe, North America and Australia. In programmes of continuing professional development for experienced teachers the labels of action research, teacher research, or research-based teaching have tended to displace ‘reflective practice’, though such distinctions are not clear-cut in the rhetoric of teacher education. These terms have become often used, sometimes interchangeably, as watchwords in relation to both stages of professional development (Elliott, 1991; McKernan, 1988, 1991; Tickle, 1994; Winter, 1989; Zeichner and Tabachnick, 1991).
