Explicating the Elusive ‘Pedagogical Reasoning’ of Expert Teachers of Science (original) (raw)
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Re-examining Pedagogical Reasoning as Means of Identifying Science Teacher Expertise
In 1987, Lee Shulman introduced the construct of teachers' pedagogical reasoning; one agenda he had was to give greater status to the complex, often sophisticated, but typically tacit wisdom of practice. Shulman's work has been much cited, but there have been few empirical studies in the area; these commonly conflate expertise with mere experience and Shulman's relatively linear 6 stage process has not been significantly explored or advanced. We report on a five year project involving teachers who were highly skilled and experienced in articulating tacit wisdom. Unlike Shulman's model, their pedagogical reasoning was a complex, rapid and very non-linear interaction between several distinct, but richly connected foci: framing big ideas, routes to student engagement promoting quality learning and developing quality learners and responding to contextual constraints and opportunities -we label this "pinball reasoning". Each of these foci can be regarded as a body of conceptual and practical knowledge. Expert practice can be explored both by researching how each focus is used as well as exploring the links between them and how reflecting on one stimulates thinking about another.
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