Full Description
This insightful collection offers a timely contribution to the body of research on practical theorising in teacher education. Acknowledging the importance of experience and reflective practice in teaching, this book simultaneously embraces the essential need for teachers at all career stages to engage effectively and critically with evidence from research.
Drawing together a range of perspectives from university-based and school-based teacher educators, this book examines the challenges and critiques advanced when practical theorising was first proposed, as well as recent tensions created by the performative culture that now pervades education. It illustrates the constant renegotiation and renewal necessary to sustain such an approach to beginners' learning, investigating a range of tools developed by teacher educators to help beginning teachers navigate these demands.
Demonstrating the value of practical theorising and therefore promoting powerful professional learning for practitioners, this book is essential for teachers at all career stages, including trainee teachers and student teachers.
Contents
Introduction, Section 1. The nature of practical theorising, 1. The role of practical theorising in teacher education: formulation, critique and response to the challenges, 2. An international perspective on practical theorising, Section 2. Negotiating the challenges of practical theorising for beginning teachers, 3. Practical theorising in learning to teach history: a shifting process of negotiation, 4. Practical theorising in a changing context: enabling beginning science teachers to negotiate different expectations in the reality of schools, 5. Developing teacher agency in drawing on research and reflection when teaching students to produce written responses to text, 6. Prospective teachers' ways of addressing challenges in teaching reasoning-and-proving, 7. Theorising practices of inclusive pedagogy: a challenge for Initial teacher education, Section 3. Tools to support practical theorising, 8. Tools for promoting practical theorising in mathematics, 9. Supporting student teachers' practical theorising via written assignments, 10. The role of assessment in supporting beginning teachers 'practical theorising' and pedagogical learning in geography education, 11. Developing the practice of teacher educators: the role of practical theorising, Section 4. Practical theorising beyond initial teacher education, 12. Sustaining practical theorising as the basis for professional learning and school development, 13. Practical theorising in the professional development of primary teachers: outcomes of the 'Thinking, Doing, Talking Science' project, 14. Curriculum: practical theorising in the absence of theory
