Reflective practice can be valuable for improving our work and can take on many forms. While reflection-in-action may be a bit taxing, reflection-on-action might be more cathartic, especially if it involves a little play. That’s where figures of speech come in. These stylistic ways of using language involve creative expression and meaning-making that can be fun to reflect on practice! Thus, after briefly reviewing figures of speech and defining a select few, participants in this interactive workshop will whip up their own batch of examples related to their teaching, learning, and/or research to share and contemplate together. It is hoped that this exchange will also lead to reflection-for-action.

Post-lesson reflections are a staple of TESOL practicums to promote professional development. But we know little about how reflections with supervisors help student teachers appropriate ideas to develop their emerging practice. This paper presentation addresses this knowledge gap through a qualitative study of the recorded post-lesson reflections of four Chinese student teachers that I supervised in an American TESOL practicum. Analysis focuses on how we sought solutions to problems of practice that interfered with student communication. It identifies ideas that we discussed and then traces how student teachers appropriated these ideas for implementation in successive lessons. The study finds that the student teachers needed supervisor assistance in identifying problems that interfered with student communication and that this assistance proceeded through stages of dialogue. Analysis identifies how student teachers exercised two principle dialogical moves that worked to change conceptions of TESOL practice and drive appropriation of new ideas for CLT implementation.