Page 32 - Beyond Methods

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Conceptualizing teaching acts
Reflective task 1.4
What might be a productive connection between a theorist’s professional theory and a teacher’s personal theory? Which one, according to you, would be relevant and reliable for your specific learning and teaching context? Is there (or, should there be) a right mix, and if so, what?
Teacher’s Theory of Practice
Any serious attempt to help teachers construct their own theory of practice requires a re-examination of the idea of theory and theory- making. A distinction that Alexander (1984, 1986) makes between theory as product and theory as process may be useful in this con- text. Theory as product refers to the content knowledge of one’s dis- cipline; whereas, theory as process refers to the intellectual activity (i.e., the thought process) needed to theorize. Appropriately, Alex- ander uses the term theorizing to refer to theory as intellectual ac- tivity. Theorizing as an intellectual activity, then, is not confined to theorists alone; it is something teachers should be enabled to do as well.
According to Alexander, a teacher’s theory of practice should be based on different types of knowledge: (a) speculative theory (by which he refers to the theory conceptualized by thinkers in the field), (b) the findings of empirical research, and (c) the experiential knowledge of practicing teachers. None of these, however, should be presented as the privileged source of knowledge. He advises teachers to approach their own practice with “principles drawn from the consideration of these different types of knowledge” (Alex- ander 1986, p. 146), and urges teacher educators “to concentrate less on what teachers should know, and more on how they might think” (ibid., p. 145). In other words, the primary concern of teach- ers and teacher educators should be the depth of critical thinking rather than the breadth of content knowledge.
Extending Alexander’s notion of teacher theorizing, and draw- ing from research conducted by others, Donald McIntyre (1993) differentiates three levels of theorizing.
• At the first, technical level, teacher theorizing is concerned with the effective achievement of short-term, classroom-centered in-