Quality Teaching as Moral Practice: Cultivating Practical Wisdom

To engage in quality teaching, requires more than just technical skills; it requires the moral capacities to achieve worthwhile aims. We posit teachers need “practical wisdom,” which cultivates teachers’ capacities to conduct themselves purposefully in the moment-to-moment episodes of human interaction by discerning the most useful questions to ask and to employ the most effective techniques to achieve intended aims. Teacher education, then, must nurture the teacher’s ability to discern both what to do and what is worth doing. This is a developmental moral practice, developed over time and situated in the contexts and dilemmas teachers find themselves in.