Review

Lively Elementary Science Programs: A Handbook of Suggestions for Introducing and Maintaining Innovative Science Activities. Submitted to the Massachusetts Advisory Council on Education by Dean K. Whitla, Project Director, and Dan C. Pinck, Associate Project Director. Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. January 1974. $3.25     

Attempting to document teachers' professional knowledge

This paper explores ways of uncovering and documenting teachers' professional knowledge. Through a research project that has worked with a number of teachers over an extensive period of time, serious attempts have been made to make the (often) tacit nature of teachers' knowledge more explicit in ways that might begin to address the question of what a knowledge base in teaching might look like. The paper examines methodological issues that have guided this research and illustrates how the knowledge of teachers can be articulated in ways that might help to clarify particular features of practice. An important aspect of the research reported in this paper is the need to have a language of teaching that is common to participants. Therefore, the research reported in this paper offers one way of considering this issue and offers a methodology for exploration and further development whilst simultaneously highlighting some aspects of the problematic nature of developing such a methodology.