Reflective communicator roles in preservice teacher team email discussions

The objective was to model a type of effective team participant, the reflective communicator, and the variety of communicative roles that they conducted during four, eight-person preservice teacher team email discussions of their classroom observations. An aggregate statistical analysis revealed significant correlations between the quality of reflective observations provided, and the number and quality of responsive messages received from other team members. Conversely, high message senders were associated with low quality messages. The reflective communicator type was theorized to occupy a distinctive niche in the team, as a source of high quality reflective observations and as someone who engaged in high level, high frequency, bi-directional communications flow of messages. Based on these criteria an individual analysis of the data revealed 13 reflective communicators among the 32 participants. Reflective communicators tended to communicate with other reflective communicators in groups containing multiple reflective communicators and increased these communications over time. Issues were raised concerning the rights of teams to assure them access to reflective communicator leaders.