This blog post shares an approach to researching persistent challenges of practice that developed in response to a practice issue: how best to support pre-service teachers to develop pedagogical reasoning (PR). Lee Shulman’s (1987) concept of PR involves a teacher’s capacity to transform subject knowledge into classroom actions that are ‘pedagogically powerful’ (Nilsson, 2009, p. 242) through comprehension, reasoning, transformation and reflection. PR is fundamental to classroom practice, but our student teachers found it challenging to develop.

We teach on a five-year undergraduate programme that prepares students to become Design & Technology teachers. In 2018, we created the Adaptive Subject Pedagogy Model (ASPM) as a scaffold to help students develop PR and undertook research to evaluate it (Morrison-Love & Patrick, 2024). We found that the ASPM helped some students to develop aspects of PR, but many still found this difficult. The depth and consistency or students’ pedagogical reasoning was variable, and their planning decisions seemed driven by learning intentions rather than by the pedagogical reasoning they had developed. Research had taken us so far and no further in understanding why. It had become what Colmenares (2021) describes as a ‘stuck moment’. We needed an alternative way to explore our practice challenge.

A framework for theorising practice

We were informed by Stepney and Thompson’s (2021) article on theorising practice. Rather than identifying and applying a theory, theorising asks us to start with our practice and engage in critical exploration through reflexive conversations with the practice issue drawing on theory, published research and practical wisdom (Stepney & Thompson, 2021, p. 154). Combining this with Coghlan and Rigg’s (2021) written accounts of practice, we adapted their framework for theorising, augmenting it with reflexive questions to make explicit our personal, practical theories (see table 1).

 Table 1: Framework for theorising (adapted from Coghlan & Rigg, 2021)

‘Developing pedagogical reasoning is an agentic process requiring explicit intellectual work between students and teacher educators to create epistemic relations that are then recontextualised during planning for teaching and classroom practice.’

Theorising helped us to understand PR as an inherently complex process. We now think that PR emerges from the creation of epistemic relations between different forms of knowledge in the degree programme. Developing PR is an agentic process requiring explicit intellectual work between students and teacher educators to create epistemic relations that are then recontextualised during planning for teaching and classroom practice. We will keep using the ASPM, but it is not sufficient on its own. From theorising, we realise that we must also create intellectual space on the programme through slow pedagogy, allowing time to engage with complexity and create epistemic relations. It also highlighted the importance of epistemic coherence: moving beyond structural convenience to create clear and meaningful relationships between different forms of knowledge across the programme.

Theorising is the most powerful way of researching our practice that we have engaged with. It changed how we perceived ourselves as teacher educators and led us to question what counts as educational research. Deng (2024, p. 788) argues that universities contribute to teacher education only ‘if educational theory and research are reconfigured and developed in ways that are significant and matter to practice’. We believe that theorising offers a way to do this.

This blog post is based on the article ‘Understanding the challenge of developing pedagogical reasoning in initial teacher education: Theorising as practice-focused research’ by David Morrison-Love and Fiona Patrick, published in the British Educational Research Journal.

References

Coghlan, D., & Rigg, C. (2021). Writing an Account of Practice as a process of theorising in action learning. Action Learning: Research and Practice, 18(3), 250–256. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767333.2021.1973958  

Colmenares, E. E. (2021). Exploring student teachers’ ‘stuck moments’: Affect[ing] the theory-practice gap in social justice teacher education. Professional Development in Education, 47(2–3), 377–391. https://doi.org/10.1080/19415257.2021.1879229

Deng, Z. (2024). Practice, pedagogy and education as a discipline: Getting beyond close-to-practice research. British Educational Research Journal, 50, 772–793. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3951

Morrison-Love, D., & Patrick, F. (2024). Supporting student teachers to integrate theory, research and practice: Developing the Adaptive Subject Pedagogy Model. Research in Science and Technological Education, 42(3), 595–617. https://doi.org/10.1080/02635143.2022.2116422

Nilsson, P. (2009). From lesson plan to new comprehension: Exploring student teachers’ pedagogical reasoning in learning about teaching. European Journal of Teacher Education, 32(3), 239–258. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619760802553048

Shulman, L. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review, 57(1), 1–21. https://dx.doi.org/10.17763/haer.57.1.j463w79r56455411

Stepney, P., & Thompson, N. A. (2021). Isn’t it time to start ‘theorising practice’ rather than trying to ‘apply theory to practice’? Practice, 33, 149–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/09503153.2020.1773420