Teaching as a Professional Discipline: A Multi-dimensional Model

First Published in 2004. This book addresses one of the most basic but problematic questions in education- what do teachers do? After reviewing various paradigms of teaching- as common sense, art, craft, competence and so on- Squires goes onto to develop a theory of professional disciplines based on three common characteristics: instrumentality, contingency and procedural. He then uses this to construct a detailed a model for the analysis of teaching, both at the level of the course and the single class, and offers what they do? Ad how do they do it? The model is related both to the age-old theory practice and to contemporary research on professional expertise. The book ends by critically assessing its implications for current approaches to pedagogical research, teacher training, and the evaluation o teaching, both in the schools sector and beyond. Drawling on a wide of literature and grounded in work with practitioners going back over a decade, 'Teaching as a Professional Discipline' offers a highly original approach to our understanding of teaching which challenges current orthodoxies and sites teaching firmly in the context of other professions. By providing a clear and coherent framework, it enables teachers and lectures to reflect more systematically on what they do and helps create a common language for talking about everyday teaching issues, problems and decisions. Academically rigorous but accessibly written, it will interest not only researchers and policy-makers but practitioners in all sectors of education and indeed in other professions such as medicine, nursing and management.

Dr. Geoffrey Squires grew up in Ireland and studies at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh.