Students’ Perceptions of Reflective Practices (RP) Implementation to Learn Critical Thinking (CT) in Class Discussions (CD)

____________________ Abstract ___________________________________________________________________ The present study delivers the twelfth grade students’ experiences who implement reflective practice as a technique to learn critical thinking skills when joining the class discussion. However, their perceptions on the above activity have to be a fundamental issue for the success of learning. This descriptive qualitative case study took place at SMA N 2 Masbagik o f East Lombok. It aimed to describe and explain students’ reflective practice implementation, their critical thinking manifestations, and their perceptions of the reflective practice implementation to learn critical thinking skills in class discussions. Taken from field notes observation and video recordings revealed three stages of reflection process considered by the students when implementing the reflective practice. It consisted of stating positive behaviour, ideas, and feelings (first stage), returning to experience, attending to feelings, and reevaluating experiences/events/phenomena (second stage), and making conclusion or commitment (third stage). They also showed three ways in expressing critical thinking as proposed by Halpern (2003). It consists of verbal reasoning, arguments, and making decision. Furthermore, the


INTRODUCTION
This study is a raising phenomenon about students at SMA N 2 Masbagik of East Lombok Regency who have experience on the technique of reflective practice (RP) to learn critical thinking (CT) in joining the class discussion (CD). The case becomes interesting when students from multiple skills in English language acquisition are requested to adapt with the target activity as good as possible in several meetings of one semester. After evaluating their activity, the students have distinctive responses regarding self-improvement process. The distinction is affected by experience of how they implement the reflective practice and how they perceive on it. Therefore, this event motivates me to examine of how students' perceptions can construct and determine the success or failure of reflective practice implementation as the way to learn critical thinking in class discussion.
In another side, the English teacher of SMA N 2 Masbagik plays a role in promoting the concept of reflective practice to his students while joining the class discussion. As well as his purpose, he tries to foster students to think critically about given issues or topic of discussion. The Students are instructed to use self-reflection as a personal consideration before doing the further actions. In his teaching, the teacher prepares discussion as a teaching and learning media with the topic about personal experience and certain issues. Afterwards, the teacher guides his students to involve idea and feelings about personal experience. During its process, the students are instructed to evaluate their experience by observing what they will learn or acquire from experience. Hence, the students are expected to be able to do selfevaluation and make a conclusion.
The above case concludes that the teacher aims to familiarize his students with reflective practice. He trained them to use this technique for several meetings in one semester. The use of class discussion aimed to mediate their activities. The students' improvement can be seen from how they interpret and criticize their related experience with the chosen topic.
Reflective practice is a learning technique that requires a conscious effort to think about events and able to develop critical thinking. It is illustrated as the process to get a lesson through reflecting personal experience. Meanwhile, Bolton (2010, p. xix) stated that reflective practice as the process of paying critical attention to the practical values and theories which inform everyday actions, by examining practice of reflection. In its application, students are engaged with their experiences to raise contradiction about certain events. They discuss and reflect the topic to evaluate and make conclusion. Furthermore, the class discussion is chosen as one of proper media to succeed the reflective practice implementation. It becomes a common activity used by teacher in teaching English.
As a part of activities in reflective practice, discussion is one of popular teaching media in classroom learning. Meanwhile, the reflective practice is recognized as a teaching and learning technique that emphasizes student to participate actively in discussion activity. The students are guided to frame their thinking related to particular topic of discussion. Here, experience has a big role to support students' belief motivation, and attitude about their thinking and information.
Theoretically, the implementation of reflective practice in class discussion is effective when students or group of them try to make solution from a particular problem of topic discussed. Each of them will have different views and try to justify their arguments.
Connecting between doing reflective practice in class discussion to develop critical thinking, Boud, Keogh, and Walker (1985) have given many examples about how the students learn by reflecting their own experiences as a self evident of making conclusion in the whole, group, or in pairs discussion activities. By doing this, the students are guided to do critical thinking about what they reflect. As explained by Vezzosi (2005), critical thinking itself brings the participants to reflect on the thinking itself, to evaluate personal thinking practice and to learn from the same learning experience. It is the intellectual process of thinking gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. However, the reflective practice implementation could be a difficult challenge for the teacher and his students. It is because the students try to engage with their feelings and cognition. Boud, Keogh, and Walker (1985, p. 11) explained that personal feelings and cognition closely related to succeed the reflective process. They argue that the students have to be smart in interpreting their experience with positive feelings than negative feelings. Positive feelings can enhance the learning process, while negative feelings can change students' perceptions and leads them into false interpretation of events.

METHODS
This study was a descriptive qualitative case study, particularly a classroom case study of the twelfth grade students who join English subject. Thus, this study was designed as a qualitative study under case study approach conducted in a single classroom consisting of 25 students in the XII IPA 1 class at SMA N 2 Masbagik. The data were gathered through field notes observations, video recording, open-ended questionnaires, and structured interview. The field notes observations and video recording were set to record every detail information of RP implementation and students' CT manifestations in implementing the RP in CD. Meanwhile, open-ended questionnaires were given once before observing the classroom. These questionnaires were conducted to reveal the students perception of the implementation of reflective practice (RP) to improve their critical thinking (CT) skill since joining classroom discussion (CD). The last, interview was set at the end of collecting the data, which invited seven participants covering one English teacher and six students of the twelfh grader of SMA N 2 Masbagik. All the collected data were further analyzed separately using thematic analysis. There were six phases used in analyzing the data in this study: (1) familiarization with the data, (2) generating initial codes, (3) searching for themes, (4)reviewing themes, (5) defining and naming themes, and (6)producing report (Brawn and Clarke, 2006).

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
The followings display the findings and discussion of this research after analyzing the data through thematic analysis. This part is divided into three parts based on research questions of the study.

Students' Reflective Practice Implementation
This section provides the sequence of classroom activity, which covers the reflective practice implementation employed by students for meeting 1, 2, and 3. A field notes and video recording are used to reveal the similar activity for each meeting. In overall, each activity is based on the reflective practice framework proposed by Gibbs (in Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 1985, p. 92-93). Meantime, in implementing the reflective practice, students should involve a process called "reflection". In this research, the common process of reflection were guidlined based on Boud, Keogh, and Walker (1985, p. 26-38). Meanwhile, the finding of this research indicates that students agreed with RP technique being implemented in the class discussion. The followings are the sequence of the reflective practice implementation.
Need to be informed that the students are guided to follow three phases of reflection. At the phase 1, the students are informed to do class discussion. The main issue for each meeting is discussing a video documenter by involving personal experience. When involving experience, the students set to place their behavior, ideas, and feelings. Further to the phase 2, the students started to implement the reflective practice. This process concerned with three stages; returning to experience, attending to feelings, and reevaluating experience. In the phase 3, refer to the outcomes of reflection. It results to the making conclusions and finding new perspectives of the topic of class discussion.
First of all, the class started at 07.30 a.m. In the meantime, the teacher prepare his modules (book exercise and "shark fins" video documenter) as teaching materials, a set of LCD and laptop as learning media. The activity is set to be a class discussion.
At the first phase, teacher opens the class by greeting students. Then, he guided his students to follow the instructions and explanations.
Jadi From above statements, the teacher started to inform that their activity would involve discussion and reflective practice. Students in this case have learned and recognized the learning process. It illustrated the teacher who aims to remind his student that cognitive and affective domain would take parts when joining the classroom activity. Implicitly, he informed students to state positive behaviour, ideas, and feelings while exploring their experiences. It aimed to meet the learning goal taken from students' experiences concerning the related topic of classroom activity.
Continue to the second phase, the teacher instructed students to form their group and arrange the position of group. Here, the group member of discussion had been set permanently since the first semester began. Each group consisted of six students. Therefore, there will be five groups. The activity ran until the last minutes of meeting.
After grouping, the teacher instructed students to watch a video documenter about shark fins discovery, which had been prepared previously. This video documenter would take about two minutes and contained of explanation text and vocabulary. Before, they watched, the teacher once again reminds his students that their activity would involve discussion and reflective practice. Therefore, he told them to pay attention and wrote any important information or questions. He also reminded them to consider about information delivered from the video, other students' responses and reflections.
After watching the video, the teacher aimed to stimulate students by asking about their responses related to the video. This aimed to construct students' reflective process, following its stages: returning to experience, attending to feelings, and reevaluating experiences (in Boud, Keogh, and Walker;1985). The teacher asked, "What you have seen from the video?" Then, Hafiz from group 1 responded, "I think, the purpose of this video was to inform us the use of shark fins and what can we do or how to make something with shark fins. And also shark fins has many use for human like food. I think so." (Field notes observation day 1, October 22, 2016). There was no more responses from the others group. It seemed that they had to concept what they wanted to say. It was the time to reconsider the point of what they wanted to inform. Therefore, the teacher gave them time to concept their idea through incorporating personal experience.
While conceiving idea, some of group started to use the reflective practice. It was began with forming reflection through communication between group members, or so called "returning to experience". By guidance from teacher, the groups started to turn back their understanding and experiences that related with shark. They looked discussed with the members. It seemed each group tried to recollect what has taken place and replayed past memory about shark in their minds. They recounting and re-observing these experiences to notice any information, which link to the topic of discussion. Here were illustrations of the reflective practice implementation in class discussion situation.
There was discussion between Martina and Yuni from the group 2. Martina said in local language, "Yoh, ndek ke ne besisik empak hiu?" (my translastion: "don't you think that shark is scaly?"). Yuni responded, "Ndeqne besisik". ( A case appeared when Yoga from the group 1 aimed to gave his statement to the class. It became a problem when the others could not understand about his statement. They felt that Yoga spoke English with difficult words and bad pronunciation. Anyway, the teacher reminded students to speak as simple and clear as possible. By this experience, the members of group 1 directly discuss to their performance. Yoga seemed being suggested by the members to revise his statement and taught him to correct his pronunciation.
The process of reflective practice continued in groups at the same situation until it ran about more than one hour. However, they kept developed their concept into the best form. They argued each other, gave suggestions, and prepared to make a conclusion. Finally, they came to the conclusion session where each of groups stated their experiences during the activity.
As the last phase, teacher gave explanation and additional information dealing with material learned. The additional material gained from English book. When the bell rang student left the room after shake and kissing their teacher's hand. The class dismissed at 09.45 a.m.
Looking at the above findings, it concluded that the common process of reflective practice implementation should involving reflection and discussion process. The concept of reflection had been reveal into three phases that represented by the above findings (Boud, Keogh, and Walker, 1985, 26-38). In the meantime, entailing the class discussion gave the best media for students to run the process of reflection Gibbs (in Boud, Keogh, & Walker, 1985, 92-93). It means that attending personal reflection through discussion supports them to learn critical thinking, where as this research finding could represent the key to proclaim that implementing the reflective practice was one of proper technique to learn critical thinking.

Students' Critical Thinking Manifestations In The Reflective Practice Implementation In Class Discussion
Critical thinking identified as the ability to discover the value of an idea, a set of beliefs, a claim, or an argument. It requires people to use logic and reasoning to evaluate evidence or information to make a decision or reach a conclusion. Critical thinking includes the component skills of analyzing arguments, making inferences using inductive or deductive reasoning, judging or evaluating, and making decisions or solving problems in the truth statement based on Lai (2011).
In this section, the writer presented critical thinking evident which appeared simultaneously when students implemented the reflective practice in class discussion. Meanwhile, the writer has been probing the similar data observation in which previously used to answer the above second question in presenting the findings. To specify the analysis, the writer focused on finding the possible critical thinking showed or expressed by students. A field note and video recording would be important sources to identify their verbal and non-verbal reactions while joining the classroom activity.
In this research, the writer selected three dimensions from Halpern's (2003) theory with its own types to categorize the criteria of critical thinking. These dimensions simultaneously illustrates of how students shows their critical thinking when implementing the reflective practice in class discussion. Verbal reasoning is the first dimension that contained of giving statement, affirming statement, denying statement, and making conclusion. Arguments is another dimension theory, which consisted of arguing based on experiences, arguing by assumption, and counter arguments. The last dimension is decision making and problem solving by its category namely make decision, identifying problems, and giving a solution of problems. Furthermore, the research findings would be described as follow.

Verbal Reasoning
Verbal reasoning is one of short taxonomy of critical thinking skills. It has category of critical skills needed to comprehend and defend against the persuasive techniques that are embedded in everyday language. In its application, verbal reasoning could be seen in form of giving statement, affirming statement, denying statement, and make a conclusion. In particular moment, several students have showed verbal reasoning as follow.

Example 1: (Giving Statement by Group 1)
In

: (Giving Statement by Group 4)
After Eva gives her opinion, Sakawali express his opinion "In my opinion, I think that garbage can make animal dead". (Field notes observation day 3, November 05, 2016) Verbal reasoning is the common process of critical thinking showed by students during my research. In this process, students prefer to give their statements than express other form of reasoning. However, it is going well and some of students enjoyed trying to speak in English. At least, the process of discussion is working during my research. It could be seen from several occasion that students practicing their speaking conversation in form of groups and class discussion which run flow.

Arguments
Arguments characterize another short taxonomy of critical thinking skills. It is set of statements with at least one conclusion and one reason that support the conclusion. In real life setting, arguments are complex with arguing based on experience, arguing by assumption, counterarguments. The above examples show how students criticize the topic of discussion. Their talks merely seemed common statements. Not only that, most of students who argue in that occasion seemed better to assume on what they wanted to say rather than argue through experience. However, they have shown kind of effort to frame some argumentation process through collaborating discussion, selected the right language and converted it into English. Some of students dare to speak it aloud. Implicitly, they have created new experience to argue through their ways.

Decision Making and Problem Solving
The other short taxonomy of critical thinking skills is decision making and problem solving. In some points, all of the critical thinking skills are used to make decisions and solve problems, but this category involves generating and selecting alternatives and judging among them. Creative thinking is subsumed under this category because of its importance in generating alternatives and restating problems and goals. In its real life student expressed in form of make decision, identifying problem, giving a solution of problems.

Example 9: Making Decision by Group 2
Andi from group 2 answer the question from group 1 about the solution in solving problem of garbage. He says "we can do some social service, where by this activity we can explain that garbage can bring many decease". ((Field notes observation day 3, November 05, 2016) The above example represents how the class discussions end. As the goal in this activity, they tried to find out some solution on the topic of discussion based on their own analysis through personal experience and group sharing session. A delegation student took part to express what groups have concluded. Finally, several of them deserve to earn credit for being active and brave in speaking English.
The writer concludes in this session that students show their critical thinking process through creating verbal statements, supporting statement by giving affirmation and denying. In another situation, kinds of short arguments also showed to examine what other's group stated. Meanwhile, making decision and have mind to solve the problem showed how students learn to conclude various ideas expressed during joining class discussion. However, I appreciate their effort to learn speaking English. How the way they shows the critical thinking and express it into speaking in English rather than Indonesian language is the main goal in joining this activity.
The above findings are some evident to prove that implementing the reflective practice in class discussion proper to direct students to learn critical thinking. It is clear that reflection could trigger students to think more critically about what they reflect. As explained previously, reflection and class discussion process were parts of reflective practice implementation to learn critical thinking. It is reasonable that the students able to express their idea through their own way to think critically. As highlighted by Choy and Oo (2012, p.170) that critical thinking is social in nature that requires reflection on the part of the learner.
Refer to the findings, it seemed that they tried to judge the given topic of discussion through some ways such as make a note, reflecting on their experience, discussing with friend to find more information. It is all expressed through making a statement, argumenting, and making conclusion. A statement from Piaget and Inhelder (in Vezzosi, 2005) believed that thinking skills were considered as the mental operations, including perception, memory, reasoning, reflection and insight. They added, it become increasingly formal and complex, bringing individuals, at the last stage, to consider their idea and conclusion from the point of views of others, and to think and evaluate their own thinking. In conclusion, how to show the critical thinking were diverse and depend on students readiness. The findings have shown that reflective practice and class discussion able to facilitate student to learn critical thinking in various way. Then, it come to a statement that could be the good strategy to make students want to learn to speak, argue, make statement and conclusion. Anyway, it would hard to be formed. It needs students' readiness to be more participate. It needs their motivation, and courage. Therefore, students' positive perceptions to the technique of reflective practice and a media of class discussion could bring strong teaching and learning environment.

Students' Perceptions
Open-ended questionnaires were given to the students before the class meeting 1, 2, and 3 to uncover their perception on the RP implementation, CD entailment, and its impact to CT skill. There were six points derived from these questionnaires as follows.
The first, how students' understanding on the theory of reflective practice implementation to learn critical thinking in class discussion. It concern to students' perception of cognitive domain concerned with their understanding of the theory of reflective practice, class discussion, and critical thinking (Anderson & Krathwohl's Taxonomy, 2002, p. 215). Findings revealed that students define the reflective practice as a technique of learning through reflection, which direct them to be more critical and full of consideration. Meanwhile, the class discussion was perceived as proper media to support the reflective practice implementation. The findings also revealed that some group of students understands a critical thinking as learning process through criticizes the given topic of discussion in detail. Try to understand its situation by observing and considering the effect arose before taking some conclusion/decision. Meanwhile, some others stated that critical thinking as a process of thinking widely and deeply about personal experience or particular event. The last, most of students think that the reflective practice implementation challenge them to express opinion/idea/statement about the given topic of discussion according to their critical thinking process involving their own experiences, which relate to the topic. Below are some examples of students' responses on the above point.
Several students responded the concept of reflective practice as "…an evaluative process on the discussed topic by involving personal experiences, which were used as a reference and a means of consideration in decision making, consciousness, utterance and/or action." (Questionnaire item 1) Several students had responded with "Through this activity we can stimulus our memories about the past events. Then, it can be our own references when we are doing discussion. Usually, these references help us to find/make a conclusion". (Questionnaire item 16) The above paragraph in line with the theory of target research in which explained by Boud, Keogh, and Walker (1985). They said that traditionally, to learn or do reflection, a person need partners or group to share what he/she wanted to share. In this case, discussion activity was a favorite and proper media to support this process. By the time of this activity, students directly triggered to think critically, responded to the sharing issues, and re-consider their past experiences as a useful teacher.
The second, refer to this finding of students' possible behavior. The data analysis revealed that students should behave positively in term of affective domain. In this finding, it covers their aspect of receiving, responding and valuing (Anderson and Krathwohl's Taxonomy, 2002:261). Aspect of receiving means that students become aware of an attitude by feeling enthusiast joining the activity. In addition, they become aware the value of self-reflection. As for responding aspect, students exhibit a reaction as result of exposure to an attitude, behavior, or value such as feeling empathy, respect to others, shows a good manner in the class. Meanwhile, perceiving to be confident, keep positive thinking, and tried to enjoy the teaching and learning represents students feeling concerning aspect of valuing.
The Third, it concern to students' possible act. It revealed that students should act positively in term of psychomotor domain. The domain covers their aspect of awareness and readiness of act (Simpson, 1972). Both of aspects were represented by students' responses. Most of them stated that they would participate in the class by connecting the given topic of discussion with personal experience. They also could improve their participation by expressing opinion or statement, criticizing or giving suggestion, telling the story of self-experience, reflect on personal experience or past events, and try to express it in English.
Students' actions and behaviour were needed to make sure that their expectation would be happened. Furthermore, building a good perception on the activity would benefit as a stepping stone for their further actions and behaviour. As Stein (2008) had stated that students' perceptions would influenced them to assume the realities and direct it into action and behaviour. Understand to this, the teacher had prepared the classroom discussion, which might possible to support students' creativity in learning critical thinking through practicing selfreflection.
The fourth, revealed the possible effect perceived by students after experiencing the reflective practice in class discussion as the aim to learn critical thinking. It revealed that students tend to perceive with positive respond rather than negative. In conclusion, most of students perceived that they could feel enjoy when implementing the reflective practice in the classroom. They believe for being improved regarding spoken English skill and critical thinking skill. They could confident to reflect and think the value taken from the given topic of discussion/personal experiences. In additional, entailing the class discussion could help them to run the reflective practice. The both activities suits students to learn critical thinking. Furthermore, the effect could refer to their affective domain such as being empathetic, respect to others' point of view, courage to speak English, and want to reflect their weakness in learning English. However, by the fact that there were negative perceptions expressed by several student indicated their uncertain in implementing this technique.
The fifth, it display students' perception on their previous experiences when implementing the reflective practice. The findings revealed various responses from students referring to the implementation. In general, they employ the process of reflection and collection of journals when discussing related topic given by the teacher. They were directed to be more active in searching information before criticizing. Therefore, they need some collaboration from each group members to share any ideas or information. The findings also revealed that students could be happy if they able to run the activity such as reflecting the discussed topic, criticize it, make a debate, and make a conclusion. In the contrary, the students perceive to avoid some situation such being forced by the teacher or other students to speak English when doing discussion. They were very happy if they able to participate and contribute in this classroom event without burden. As for another parts of findings revealed that trying to enjoy and learn without burden could be the key for students when implementing the above activity. In some moments, the hardest part faced by students could be caused by language obstacle, lack of sources that correlated with the topic of discussion, and lack of cooperation to success the target activity.
The sixth, displayed students' perception on their expectations when implementing the reflective practice. The findings revealed that some of students expected for being able to implement this technique better, easier, more practical, and implemented in all kinds of subjects. They also expect the class discussion could simplify their teaching and learning activity. While, some other students hope for critical thinking skill improvement and have courage to express their thinking in English.
Regard to the form of critical thinking itself, most of students expects to be able to express personal opinion with strong evidence. Some students also expect to think and criticize the topic of discussion broadly and deeply.
From all of six point, there were several negative perceptions that could be a problem if we do not count on its' existence. It could be warning for the students and target activity itself. They would behave, acted, and expected the classroom event negatively.
Considering the few of negative perceptions, students' lack the understanding of reflective practice, critical thinking, class discussion, and its affiliation in classroom activity raised as a potential factor. It could also misunderstand and disbelieving the item of the questionnaire, which possibly caused students giving such negative perceptions. As for in the item 1, one students just did not know of how to describe or explain on the concept of reflective practice. Meanwhile, another one directly judges the concept of reflective practice as a technique that cannot help people (students) to speak English.

CONCLUSION
The students had positive perception on the implementation of reflective practice (RP), which aimed to improve their critical thinking (CT) skill when joining the classroom discussion (CD). They stated it could increase their critical thinking. In conclusion, students and teachers are the main actor to play role in the success of classroom activity. In this case, they should consider constructing positive perception from the beginning of the activity. Furthermore, the reflective practice implementation in class discussion should be based on clear instructions and theoretical background to meet the teaching and learning goal, especially for students who aim to learn critical thinking.