Teacher actions, behaviours, beliefs and knowledge shape the way in which teaching is undertaken. Actions and behaviours are observable and are understandably used to support teacher education (pre-service), and teacher development for in-service teachers. Teacher beliefs and teacher knowledge, unless verbalised or externalised, are non-observable. While the observables of teaching underpin much of classroom practice, the non-observables remain minimally understood, under-researched and under-used. This blog post highlights the non-observables in teaching by using cognitive processes.

Cognitive processes in teaching constitute knowledge processing which leads to relevant teacher actions and teacher behaviours. These cognitive processes are non-observable and tacit in nature. Based on doctoral research (see Enow, 2023; Enow, 2016) cognitive processes – decision-making, problem-solving, pedagogical reasoning, professional judgment, memory, teacher perception, and intuition – were identified and presented together to externalise these non-observable constituents of teaching. Teacher actions, teacher behaviours, beliefs and knowledge thereby combine to effect classroom practice. This blog post draws attention to cognitive processes through which the tacit composition of teaching could be accessed, explored and understood. A combination of the observables and non-observables in teaching should support both pre-service and in-service teacher development.

‘A combination of the observables and non-observables in teaching should support both pre-service and in-service teacher development.’

To embed exploration of non-observables in teaching using cognitive processes, the following questions – which explicitly specify each of the cognitive processes – are recommended:

Decision-making: Which procedures do teachers [or do you] follow when they [you] are making pedagogical decisions?

Problem-solving: Which problems of practice are teachers seeking to solve as they engage in decision-making?

Pedagogical reasoning: What are the pedagogical reasoning opportunities which are informing practice?

Professional judgment: How accurate are professional judgments and how are teachers using reflection to refine these?

Memory: What is the impact of short-term, medium- and long-term memory on the efficiency of practice?

Teacher perception: Is there a place for teacher perceptions?

Intuition: How are teachers drawing on their intuition and what is the impact?

Teachers make several instructional decisions; the minute-by-minute choices on how to progress with their lesson (see Sternberg & Maaranen, 2022). Decision-making is the foundational cognitive process in teaching (see for example Hora, 2012). According to Lloyd (2017) decision-making is the link between teacher thinking and teacher action with impact on learning outcomes, such as levels of accommodation or assimilation of new knowledge. Taub and Azevedo (2023) establish links between decision-making and student outcomes but highlight that not all teachers are effective with instructional decision-making.

Instructional or pedagogical decision-making is one of many cognitive processes, all of which capture the thinking (non-observable) which is necessary for teaching. Before arriving at an instructional decision, a teacher identifies and engages with problems of practice (i.e. problem-solving), to which they apply pedagogical reasoning (see Loughran, 2019) and professional judgment, and/or any of the cognitive processes.

Depending on their stage of expertise development – for example stages of the Dreyfus model of expertise development: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient and expert (see Enow & Goodwyn, 2018; Goodwyn, 2016; Enow, 2016; Loughran, 2010) – teachers draw on banks of examples (non-expert) or banks of outcomes (proficient and expert) from their experience which are accessed through memory. The speed of information retrieval from memory and its application tends to be impacted by the stage of expertise development (Ericsson et al., 2018). Teacher perceptions contribute to teacher decision-making, and intuitive decision-making is the outcome of extensive and ongoing deliberate practice. Intuition is essential for the spontaneity of teacher action which pre-empts and prevents problems of practice. Teacher beliefs or pedagogical beliefs, which according to Sternberg and Maaranen (2022) seem resistant to change, have an impact on teacher decision-making.

In sum, teacher actions and behaviours, which are observable, combined with the non-observable beliefs and knowledge (accessed in this paper using cognitive processes) result in classroom practice with related outcomes for student learning. Cognitive processes, as introduced in this blog post, evidence a way in which the non-observables in teaching could be accessed. It is therefore crucial for these implicit and explicit constituents of teaching to be addressed by teacher educators and Continuous Professional Development (CPD) facilitators for the development of pre-service and in-service teachers.

This blog post is based on the article ‘How efficiently are we using our understanding of the tacit dimension of teaching?’ by Linda Enow, published in the Review of Education.

References

Enow, L. O. (2016). Teacher cognition: A study of secondary English teachers (EdD thesis, University of Reading). https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/66017/

Enow, L. O. (2023). How efficiently are we using our understanding of the tacit dimension of teaching?’, Review of Education, 11(2). https://bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/rev3.3411

Enow, L., & Goodwyn, A. (2018). The invisible plan: How English teachers develop their expertise and the special place of adapting the skills of lesson planning. English in Education, 52(2), 120–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/04250494.2018.1438119

Ericsson, K. A., Hoffman, R. R. Kozbelt, A., & Williams, A. M. (2018). The Cambridge Handbook of expertise and expert performance. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316480748

Goodwyn, A. (2016). Expert teachers: An international perspective. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203069578

Hora, M. T. (2012). Organizational factors and instructional decision-making: A cognitive perspective. Review of Higher Education, 35(2), 207–235. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2012.0001

Lloyd, C. A. (2017). Exploring the real-world decision-making of novice and experienced teachers. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 43(2), 166–182. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2017.1357070   

Loughran, J. (2010). What expert teachers do: Enhancing professional knowledge for classroom practice. Allen & Unwin.

Loughran, J. (2019). Pedagogical reasoning: The foundation of the professional knowledge of teaching. Teachers and Teaching, 25(5), 523–535. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2019.1633294

Stenberg, K., & Maaranen, K. (2022). Promoting practical wisdom in teacher education: A qualitative descriptive study. European Journal of Teacher Education, 45(5), 617–633. https://doi.org/10.1080/02619768.2020.1860012

Taub, M., & Azevedo, R. (2023). Teachers as self-regulated learners: The role of multimodal data analytics for instructional decision making. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 2023(174), 25–32. https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.20545