Empowering teachers: using teaching images to understand self.

During a professional development program, teachers working in child care centres reflected on their images of teaching and their images of self as teacher. Teachers explored their images by engaging in conversation, drawing, metaphor and journal writing. Insights provided by these reflective strategies enabled teachers to experience greater self-understanding, awareness and knowledge and reduced feelings of isolation common to teachers who work in child care centres. This renewed awareness was empowering leading teachers to feel more certain and confident about their complex teaching roles and their teaching decisions. Feeling better equipped to deal with ongoing complexity, the teachers were able to imagine new possibilities for their work and felt liberated to progress in new directions.