Minimizing Burnout through Reflection: The Rocky Road ahead of EFL Teachers

Abstract

Teacher reflection has been recently promoted based on the claim that it positively affects various aspects of teaching and provides solutions to some of the challenges teachers encounter in their career. However, these arguments are mainly theory-driven with little empirical evidence indicating the constructive role of teachers' involvement in reflection. Inspired by this scarcity of research, the first objective of this mixed-methods study was to examine how English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers' engagement in reflective practice can be associated with their burnout. To this end, 223 Iranian EFL teachers completed reflection and burnout inventories. The results indicated that reflection is negatively correlated with burnout implying that involvement in reflective practice is associated with less burnout. Having found this, we conducted some interviews to explore the factors which impede teachers' reflection. Analysis of interview data revealed that impediments to reflection can be divided into the four categories of teacher related, job related, curriculum related and student related issues. Implications of this study for teacher education research and practice are discussed.