Beyond Peer and Supervisor: How a Four-Source Feedback Configuration Cultivates Reflective Independence in Pre-Service Music Teachers
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Keywords
reflective practice, pre-service music teachers, multi-source feedback, microteaching, graduate mentor
Abstract
Third-year pre-service music teachers in Chinese conservatoires approach the school-placement year with limited confidence in judging and improving their own lesson designs once the daily presence of a supervising professor recedes. The present study investigates the mechanisms through which a four-source feedback configuration in microteaching, combining self, peer, graduate-mentor, and faculty-advisor assessment, cultivates the reflective capacities pre-service music teachers will need to draw on independently after they leave the university. Grounded in Schön's theory of reflective practice and Korthagen and Kessels' ALACT model, the study adopts an exploratory mixed-methods case study design with eight third-year music education students at a Chinese conservatoire. Data comprise paired pre- and post-intervention questionnaires (n = 8), individual retrospective interviews with all eight participants, and structured reflective journals completed after each microteaching cycle (with four selected for in-depth analysis). The findings suggest that the four-source configuration supports reflective independence through two complementary mechanisms: cultivating evaluative standards when participants assess peers, and surfacing self-perceived blind spots when they encounter discrepant evaluations of their own designs. Participants converged on a tiered model of source differentiation in which the graduate-mentor tier, largely absent from existing multi-source assessment research, emerges as a distinctive scaffold between peer and faculty advisor.
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