ABSTRACT
It is not very original to be troubled by the complex relation between theory and practice in the domain of teacher thinking research. For almost a century, scholars in the field of teaching have tried to answer the persisting question of what ‘teaching’ looks like, and how ‘effective teaching’ can be defined. Their sophisticated endeavours obviously contrast with the popular wisdom of millions of practitioners, as reflected in the description of teaching by Montaigne more than four hundred years ago: ‘du bon coeur, du bon sens et quelques petits trucs’ (‘a warm heart, a sound mind and some handy tricks’). In some way, Montaigne already anticipated the cognitive approach by including the mind in his definition. But any concept is dependent upon place and time and, thus, not directly transferable from a practical toward a scientific endeavour, nor from a sixteenth toward a twentieth century conceptualization.
