Exploring the Pedagogical Reasoning of Skilled Teachers (original) (raw)

DESCRIPTION Paper presented at the Australasian Science Education Research Association Annual Conference, (July 2014). Melbourne, Victoria. Abstract In an era of Standards and teacher accountability, the question of how to determine pedagogical expertise has become all the more important. Shulman introduced the construct of pedagogical reasoning to describe teachers’ thinking as they plan and reflect on ways of making content material pedagogically powerful. His work is much cited, but rich descriptions and analyses of the pedagogical reasoning of expert (as distinct from merely experienced) teachers are rare. This session reports issues and early data from a new project in this area. The project has had two stages, both involving collaborative teacher research. A pilot project, involving teachers skilled at promoting metacognition, revealed that the teachers’ pedagogical reasoning involved a constant interplay between (at least) four foci, framing and sequencing “big ideas”, genera...