ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the epistemological assumptions underpinning the constructivist approach to learning and their implications for the construction of professional knowledge in teaching. These include consideration of how professional learning conversations, mentoring relationships and practices, peer observation and pupil perspectives enable teachers to reflect on pedagogical issues through multiple lenses. The key message is that interpretation is a meaning-making process, contextually driven and situationally bound, and several possible meanings can be associated with any course of action dependent upon whose perspectives and interpretations of experience are being sought. An open-minded attitude and receptive, collaborative disposition to enquiry enables teachers to engage with alternative perspectives and possibilities from a wide range of lenses that, in turn, can change their internal representations of knowledge in response to these perspectives as well as through cumulative experience.
