Quality Teaching - A Sample of Cases (Hardcover)

Edgar Stones breaks through the sterile debate between theory and practice by focusing on teachers as inquirers trying to solve pedagogical problems and drawing on all the resources - educational and psychological theory, practical teaching experience, knowledge of their subject - at their disposal in order to do so. By detailed analysis of numerous case studies of novice and experienced teachers grappling with real classroom problems, Stones shows that true quality teaching is only achieved by sensitivity to the interplay between the processes by which children acquire knowledge, the structure of knowledge within the subject being taught and the whole context in which the teaching is being done. He makes available to teachers and student teachers a whole body of empirically based psychological knowledge on concept learning, problem solving and the learning of physical skills and shows for the first time how this knowledge can inform and at the same time be refined by what happens in the classroom. Throughout he supports teachers as explorers in pedagogy and active problem solvers, guided but not limited by theoretical insights from the study of human learning. This book should be