ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss how the principles and theory that are the foundation for understanding the nature and development of student knowledge can provide a foundation for understanding the nature and development of teacher knowledge. Much of the early research on teachers’ knowledge focused on what it is that teachers did and how particular teachers’ actions affected student learning. Hidden in this emphasis are two flawed assumptions that have undergirded research on the development of teachers’ knowledge: (a) that learning to teach is a matter of learning how to do what effective teachers do, and (b) that there is some generally unspecified image of a good teacher that novices should strive to emulate in action. This conceptualization of teachers’ knowledge development as learning how and what it is that teachers do is problematic at several levels. Among other things, it focuses preservice teacher education and continued professional development on the pragmatics of skills, procedures, guidelines and rules of thumb that can be used in the classroom. As Lampert and Ball (1998) and others have noted, preservice teachers come to their teacher education programs with years of experience in observing what teachers do and this experience is, in fact, an obstacle for novice teachers to overcome in developing their own effective practice. The crux of the difficulty is not whether or not these preservice teachers have observed poor teaching. The difficulty is that the years of observing what it is that teachers do seldom provide preservice teachers with insight into how it is that teachers think or even what aspects of the teaching and learning process that teachers are thinking about.
