Self-reflexivity – Transversal Competence in Teachers’ Training

As self-reflecting human beings, we generate thoughts on our perceptions, ideas and emotions. The mechanism that coordinates our ability to take a meta-position towards ourselves and to pass to a meta-level of analysis of our own subjective experience is the self-reflective conscience. Its products are known to us as meta-cognition, meta-communication, meta-states, and so on. By the meta-levels model we can discover how our conscience works and we can train it methodically for productive and resourceful states.This conceptualization of the meta-levels uses the insights of Korzybski, Gregory Bateson and Michael Hall on the logical abstracting levels and offers a theoretical foundation for the conceptualization of “the states about states”. It also allows us to draw a methodological approach for the training of teachers in building resourceful meta - states in order to increase the efficiency of the educational process. A meta-state, in an operational definition, is a state of conscience “above” or “beyond”, relative to any primary state of conscience. For example, the curiosity about curiosity (intense curiosity), the acceptance of confusion (as a gate to knowledge). This study aims to set a new methodological direction in training teachers, education at a meta-level, that points towards the cultivation of self-reflective conscience. This type of conscience will allow the teachers to be trained for accessing resourceful states for teaching thei r clients. From the standpoint of the developmental psychology, students are in full process of formal thinking building, a good time for cultivating post-formal thinking and building abstractions on the abstract things they emit or learn in the field of e ducational sciences. By training these skills, the teacher-to-be adds a cross-competence to the portfolio of skills, the self-reflective conscience that will facilitate flexible adaptation to the permanent changes of the inner system, his/her own personality and the external one, the educational system in permanent reform.