The research, led by Ifeoma Cecil Okechukwu-Uzoechi of the STADIO School of Education in Durban, South Africa, together with colleagues at Rajamangala University of Technology Krungthep in Bangkok, set out to address a persistent weakness in teacher preparation. Conventional programs transmit valuable skills, from curriculum planning to classroom management, but often leave graduates stranded between educational theory and the messy realities of the classroom. Reflection is routinely prescribed as the remedy, yet it is frequently left unstructured, producing what the authors describe as superficial rather than transformative understanding. Their aim was to give reflection an explicit architecture, and an emotional foundation to match.

The theoretical scaffolding rests on three pillars. Donald Schön’s classic model of the reflective practitioner distinguishes reflection-in-action, the on-the-fly adjustment of judgment during teaching, from reflection-on-action, the more deliberate analysis that follows. Lev Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory contributes the insight that reflection is not a solitary act but a socially mediated one, deepened by dialogue and by the Zone of Proximal Development, the space between what learners can do alone and what they can achieve with support. Ron Ritchhart’s Visible Thinking Approach supplies the operational bridge: structured routines such as See-Think-Wonder, I Used to Think… Now I Think, Compass Points, Step Inside, Claim-Support-Question and Think-Puzzle-Explore, which externalize cognitive processes and make them available for inspection and discussion. Contemplative practice, in turn, was expected to supply the inner conditions, calm, self-awareness, and emotional regulation, that allow such routines to do their work.

The study took the form of a qualitative case study conducted at a teachers’ training college in South Africa between January and March 2025. From an initial pool of twenty-six final-year pre-service teachers aged twenty-two to thirty, twelve participants, eight women and four men, met the inclusion criteria of informed consent, full attendance at VTA sessions, and completion of pre- and post-practicum reflection activities. Each VTA routine ran as a structured, instructor-led activity of roughly thirty to forty minutes embedded in weekly seminars. Crucially, before each routine, participants spent three to five minutes on a brief mindfulness exercise such as breath awareness, performed in small groups, followed by whole-class debriefs.

Data came from three triangulated sources: individual semi-structured interviews of about forty-five minutes with each participant, two focus group discussions of roughly an hour each, and bi-weekly reflective journals responding to structured prompts. Thematic analysis, following Braun and Clarke’s iterative procedure, produced a hierarchical coding tree that reached both code and meaning saturation after about two-thirds of the corpus had been analyzed, with the remaining data confirming rather than extending the emerging patterns. Rigor was reinforced through member checking, peer debriefing, reflexive journaling by the research team, and an audit trail, while ethical clearance came from the KwaZulu-Natal Research Ethics Committee under reference HSS/1915/0166 M.

Four interlocking themes emerged. The first, metacognitive growth, was the most pervasive. Participants repeatedly described how See-Think-Wonder disrupted habitual, often deficit-oriented readings of learners. One participant, identified as Ms. N, wrote that when she first saw a photograph of a noisy class she immediately judged the students as disrespectful, but the routine revealed how quickly she jumped to conclusions, and she now forces herself to list only what she actually sees before interpreting. Another participant said the routine slowed down his teacher brain, replacing blame with the question of what else could be happening. The journaling routine I Used to Think… Now I Think prompted some participants to revise entrenched beliefs about discipline and classroom control, although not everyone transformed dramatically; one participant still held that discipline must come first, yet conceded the routine opened a door to trying something different.

The second theme concerned emotional and professional identity. Participants reported that short breathing exercises reduced anxiety before presentations and created small moments of calm that helped them articulate their thinking. Contemplative pauses appeared to ground them, making the cognitive routines feel less mechanical and more personal. Yet identity development proved nonlinear and sometimes uncomfortable. Several participants confessed persistent imposter feelings, with one writing that despite learning a great deal, she still did not feel teacher enough when comparing herself to others. The authors interpret this through identity frameworks that see teaching identities as negotiated between internal self-perception and external expectation, with contemplative practice creating the space for that negotiation and VTA routines providing the language for it.

The third theme, social-constructivist learning, highlighted the Vygotskian heart of the intervention. Working through the routines in groups generated a shared professional vocabulary, with terms like evidence, interpretation and wonderings entering everyday conversation. Disagreement, initially experienced as irritating, turned out to be pedagogically productive: participants reported that having to justify their interpretations to skeptical peers pushed them into their collective zone of proximal development, converting polite consensus into genuine critical thought. One participant noted that although she felt annoyed when her idea was brushed off, she later realized the friction had helped her think more rigorously. The routines thus functioned as cultural tools mediating social learning, exactly as Vygotsky’s framework would predict.

The fourth theme, contemplative integration, captured how mindfulness reshaped engagement with the thinking routines themselves. Some participants initially found the practices strange, with one admitting it felt odd to close her eyes in a teacher education class. Within two to three weeks, however, attitudes shifted, and participants reported that the mindfulness breaks slowed them down and allowed more honest engagement with what they were observing. The authors caution that this receptivity was not automatic; novices may experience discomfort or resistance before recognizing the professional value of contemplative practice, echoing recent scholarship noting that such practices require careful scaffolding.

The study’s practical implications are concrete. The authors recommend sequencing VTA routines developmentally, beginning with observational routines like See-Think-Wonder and progressing toward interpretive and critical forms such as Claim-Support-Question, so that reflection deepens in stages. They further suggest embedding brief contemplative practices before and after thinking routines to enhance emotional regulation and openness to perspective-taking, and deliberately designing group-based reflection to normalize cognitive conflict as a learning resource. Teacher education programs adopting the framework are advised to provide professional learning for teacher educators in both visible thinking facilitation and basic contemplative techniques.

The authors are careful about the limits of their claims. The sample was small and self-selected, drawn from a single institution, and participants were not tracked into their early careers, so the findings are context-specific rather than generalizable. Future research, they suggest, could employ larger mixed-methods or longitudinal designs to test whether VTA-plus-contemplative frameworks influence later classroom practice, teacher wellbeing, and ultimately learner outcomes. Nor do they claim the integration transforms teacher education outright. Rather, they argue, it created fruitful conditions in which novice teachers could experiment with new ways of seeing, feeling and making sense of their practice. In an era when education systems face upheaval on multiple fronts, the study makes a case that preparing teachers is as much about cultivating metacognitive insight, emotional presence and social responsibility as it is about technical competence, and that a few minutes of mindful breathing before a structured thinking routine may be one of the simplest, most teachable ways to begin.

Subject of Research: An integrated visible thinking and contemplative learning framework for fostering reflective practice in pre-service teacher education

Article Title: Integrating visible thinking and contemplative learning to foster reflective practice in pre-service teacher education

Article References: Okechukwu-Uzoechi, I. C., Anyanwu, C. C., Rakthin, C., Songsiengchai, S., Vorawattanachai, P., & siripala, W. (2026). Integrating visible thinking and contemplative learning to foster reflective practice in pre-service teacher education. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 902. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02158-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02158-6

Keywords: visible thinking approach, contemplative learning, reflective practice, pre-service teachers, teacher education, mindfulness, metacognition, professional identity, Vygotsky, Schön, Project Zero, qualitative case study