Descriptive inquiry: cultivating practical wisdom with teachers

Promoting practical wisdom in teacher education: a qualitative descriptive study

“…Practical wisdom, namely the experiential knowledge used by teachers to decide on a course of effective, intentional action (Halverson 2004), is possible when PPTs are consistent with pedagogical decisions and furthermore teaching practice. Such congruence enables robust knowing and provides the teacher with flexibility to modify his/her response to situations and effectively respond to them (see Furman 2018).…”

“…Hence, practical wisdom is the experiential knowledge possessed by a particular person and used by such an individual to decide the course of his/her intentional, effective actions (Halverson 2004). When considering the teaching field, Furman (2018) notes that the term practical wisdom refers to robust knowing, that is, the flexibility to adapt one's responses to a range of situations and effectively and ethically respond to such situations in practice. In other words, practical wisdom emerges from a vision of the good, and it is connected with the ability to frame and solve problems (Halverson 2004).…”

“…Within the context of teaching and teacher education, several practices have served as tools for cultivating teachers' and student teachers' abilities to use practical wisdom in teaching. These include detailed focused reflection (Korthagen et al 2001), descriptive inquiries (Furman 2018), reading reflective teacher narratives (Furman 2015), self-study (Lunenberg and Korthagen 2009) and inquiry-based learning (Phelan 2005).…”

“…Interacting with the salient components of teaching, i.e. curriculum, context and students (Lunenberg and Korthagen 2009), demands thoughtfulness, care (Furman 2018) and the integration of professional and interpersonal knowledge (Goodfellow 2003). According to Furman (2015), teaching skills have a central place in professional action, but they are not enough.…”

Educational Improvement: Insights From Policy, Research and Practice in the New Zealand Context, and Implications for Teacher Education

“…In the teaching inquiry teachers consider how they could and should go about teaching in ways that are most likely to help learners achieve the priority outcomes established in the focusing inquiry. There are two key informants of teachers' decisions about what approaches and strategies are most likely to work -the first is the experience of practitioners includingtheir own and others' (Furman, 2018) and the second is research evidence (Sinnema & Aitken, 2014).…”