ABSTRACT
An interactionist approach, in the tradition of Mead, Burke and Blumer, or a more phenomenological approach, in the tradition of Alfred Schutz, H. Garfinkel and A. V. Cicourel, permits a variety of models and analyses, but all would share, a fundamental concern with the act-actor-situation matrix at the heart of human action, and all would see decision-making as an artful, skilled accomplishment in which values have a place. This chapter draws out the more general implications of that analysis for a model which can be applied to a much greater variety of routine classroom decisions. It is that many of the routine decisions by teachers take the form of what Alfred Schutz calls 'cookery-book knowledge' or recipes which provide 'typical solutions for typical problems available for typical actors'. R. Sharp and A. Green have examined the disjunction between the values that 'progressive' teachers profess and their classroom practice.
