The Perceived Impacts of Student-Teachers’ Reflective Journal on Their Teaching Performance

Reflective journal has a great impact for teachers in improving their performance and skill in teaching. It is also helpful for teachers in evaluating their daily teaching performance. Thus, this study was conducted to explore how student-teachers perceived impacts of their reflective journal writing experience toward their teaching performance. Student-teachers can be defined as undergraduate students who are enrolled in teacher education program, but they do not fulfill yet the requirements as a professional teacher career. Two research questions were formulated in this study: 1) What are the impacts of the reflective journal perceived by the student-teachers as a mean to improve their teaching performance? And 2) What issues are normally written by the student-teachers in the reflective journal?. Qualitative method was applied to interpret the result which is obtained from applying 5 semi-structured questions of interview. This study conducted at Ar-Raniry State Islamic University which involved 8 student-teachers of English Language Education Department as the participants. The result of this study indicated that the student-teachers perceived that reflective journal is an important tool which can be used by the student-teachers to evaluate their teaching performance. The student-teachers revealed some perceived impacts toward the reflective journal such as improving the student-teachers’ awareness of teaching performance, having good knowledge about their students, and helping them to be a good future teacher. Meanwhile, issues that the student-teachers normally written in the reflective journal are about teaching issues, teaching method, classroom issues and teaching material. This thesis is hoped to be beneficial for student-teachers and for the next researchers who are interested in conducting research related to reflective journal.