Teacher reflection: support to promote representational change in conceptions and practices of teachers

The purpose of this paper is to show how teacher reflection, that uses the implicit and explicit conceptions of teaching and learning as the focus of analysis, constitutes a strategy to re-describe or give a new hierarchy to concepts rooted in traditional assumptions or transmission, predominant in teaching practices that lack effectiveness in the teaching and learning processes. It is argued that structuring reflection processes among teachers, developed through methods and processes of socio-cultural nature, with mediations that facilitate the state of specification and awareness raising, and also receive institutional endorsement, can foster the reconstruction of the implicit conceptions and achieve a more coherent relationship between theory and teaching practice, with a view to bring about changes in the processes of initial teacher training.