Abstract:
The experiences to which students are exposed depend on teachers' beliefs about teaching and learning. Teachers plan the content and method of lessons, but in the classroom further decisions must be made as a result of events that cannot necessarily be anticipated. Effective description of the ways experts make decisions - the framing of what Shulman(1987) called the "wisdom of practice" - could allow such knowledge to be effectively conveyed to less competent teachers. The full study aims to examine teachers' work, using a combination of small scale close analysis (the focus of this paper) and large scale survey, to explore how beliefs affect practice and how the complexity of classroom events can best be described.