Summary:

Häcker begins by describing impressions of the efforts towards a reflective professionalization in the teaching profession. The impressions are controversial; on the one hand, a high level of reflective competence is expected and, on the other hand, studies indicate a poor quality of critical thinking among students of teaching profession. Häcker attributes the impressions presented to a mixture of highly driven idealism and increased pressure for efficiency in teacher education rather than to a pragmatic-realistic tendency. This is followed by an explanation as to why it seems justified to consider reflexivity as an essential factor for building and maintaining professional skills and for the further development of professional action. Häcker justifies this on the basis of various arguments. First of all he mentions the duty to justify pedagogical interventions, which can only be achieved by successful reflection. Through successful reflection teachers can justify and explain their actions and thereby legitimize them. As a further argument for the relevance of the ability to reflect, Häcker mentions the knowledge-capability problem. The implicit knowledge is transformed into explicit knowledge by the action, which in turn must be compared and reflected in order to realize scientifically based intervention-practical action and thus pedagogical professionalism. Furthermore, Häcker points out the requirement structure of the everyday pedagogical actions of teachers, which requires the reflection of experiences for flexible coping. However, Häcker explains why he considers it ambitious to promote the reflection competence of future teachers. His justifications are based on the ambiguity of the definition of reflection, the difficulty of making this measurable, and the largely open questions of whether the ability to reflect can be promoted and whether a high level of teacher reflexivity leads to better learning performance among students. In the last part of the text Häcker finally formulates a series of theses that are intended to provoke and contribute to a more pragmatic-realistic attitude towards the paradigm of the 'reflexive practitioner', positioning itself between mystification on the one hand and trivialization on the other.

Language: German