ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a different but related set of limits of practice as a strategy of change. The teacher's practical knowledge is to provide more constructive tools for teacher's professional development. The word "practice" travels in current Chinese research on teacher's practice to help teachers bring moral and emotional elements into a harmonious whole that promotes the education of students to be good citizens. Reform-oriented research on teacher practice is about changing teachers into different kinds of people. The certainty and conservatism in the research on teacher practices are not intended but are inscribed in the principles that are given as transforming practice. These principles embody teaching and the teacher as performing in a system. Practice is, paradoxically, a theory of change to actualize the desired principles about who the teacher should be and yet, at the same time, is bound to the given norms and values of the abstraction of the system's model.
