Pedagogical Wisdom: The Art Of Teachers’ Balancing

Pedagogical wisdom should be considered to be the sovereign virtue of excellent teaching in the trend of educational reform, which the educational theories have argued and teaching practice and teacher education have appealed. In the paradigm of modernism teaching, learning to teach is mainly regarded to the direct application of theory to the practice, in which the best source of pedagogical knowledge comes from theory researchers rather than the instructors themselves. In the postmodernist views about it. the teacher’s personal practical knowledge is valued and the best source is the teachers themselves rather than theory researchers. In the perspective of Aristotle’s praxis and phronesis. the thesis argued that teaching should be viewed as praxis, from which pedagogical wisdom is held the most important forms of the knowing and teaching reasoning. On the view, good teaching combines practical knowledge of certain educational goods and values with sound balancing about what constitutes an appropriate expression of those values, so pedagogical wisdom for excellent teaching is essentially practical wisdom.To help those who view teaching as an instrumental technical activity or those who view teaching as spontaneous activity, move towards a notion of teaching being primarily a practical-moral activity, the meaning of teaching practice should be made explicit. From the perspective of epistemology, the teaching practice means construing the virtue structure of subject matters and constructing participating learning. For Teachers, teaching is essentially ethical inquiry. From the perspective of axiology, the cultivation of creativity, deliberative imagination and democratic virtues should be emphasized. From the perspective of methodology, teaching should include means-ends practical reasoning and the ends-constitutes of practical reasoning. When teachers apply theories to practice, they should goes into the relationship of being modified by each other from the means-ends reasoning.If teaching is constructed as moral-practice, pedagogical wisdom is necessary. So pedagogical wisdom is defined as the agency of how they deal with the teaching practical problems, which is basically characterized by the art of teacher’s balancing. Teaching practical problem is inherently value-conflict dilemma, which is expressed by the conflict of teaching intrinsic values and extrinsic values, or by the conflict of social educational need and individual potential. Essential attributesof pedagogical wisdom is the art of balancing, and judgement principle of pedagogical balancing is excellence which is integrated of rationality, efficiency and creativityBased on the agency stance of balancing, the thesis constructs a lens of agency stance for discerning the teachers’pedagogical wisdom. When teaching activity is simplified as a technical one, the teacher’s agency is characterized by reflective equilibrium, teachers are inclined to choose appropriate universal principles,control and reduce the uncertainty of teaching activity according to it, so the efficiency will become the main principle of the teacher’s balancing. When the teaching activity excessively extends to the spontaneous activity, the teacher will goes into the perceptive spontaneity. Teachers will immerse in the here-and-now situation and tend to deviate from the universal principle or the core teaching value. If so, the creativity will be valued.When teaching is practical-moral activity, teachers will goes into the perceptive equilibrium. They can discern the key features of influencing the development of students, and teachers will continually balance the conflict of universal and individual in order to make the teaching system in harmony.Among the three agency stances, the perceptive equilibrium indicates the generation of the pedagogical wisdom.To illustrate the agency stance of the teachers’ pedagogical wisdom, the study investigated teaching-related dilemmas of three superfine-teachers in the senior middle school through classroom observations and interviews. A analytic lens of agency stance used the interplay between the respondents’ teaching commitments and the particulars of the "problem" at hand as a way of discerning instances, to explore when respondents took a perceptive equilibrium stance to their teaching. The study suggests that the three respondents took different stances to making sense of contextual particularities and balancing the competing teaching ends. Two teachers illustrate the perceptive equilibrium and the other is in reflective equilibrium.In the similar context, the difference basically results from the different understanding of the nature of teaching and different value-orientation.In the cross-case analysis of the three cases, the agency stance as the analytic lens of discerning pedagogical wisdom should be tested and modified. To emphasize the agency stance of balancing, the other aspects of pedagogical wisdom may be overlooked. So their wise experience should be re-interpreted to explore the generative mechanism of pedagogical wisdom. The prerequisite of pedagogical-wisdom gereration is educational understanding of subject knowledge; its logical point is salient-focus situational discernment, its thinking mode is evaluative deliberation; and its action desposition is teaching performance of adaptive change. According the the approaches of its generation, pedagogical wisdom will be sorted into three styles,which are intuitive wisdom、 balancing widom and transformative wisdom. The key factors of influencing the generation of teacher’s pedagogical wisdom is not only experience and practical community, but also theory, subject knowledge and the degree of choice freedom as well.The view of pedagogical-wisdom-orientated teacher learning should be coherence learning, integrating the theory from research and personal practical knowledge to make the teaching system harmonious. On the view and key factors of influencing it, the thesis constructs a system of theory subject knowledge experience and existing practical wisdom. The aims of theory learning move from technical application to expanding educational perspective and improving the evaluative deliberation. The content of theory learning should be practical knowledge rather than theory science and practical science, the activity of theory learning should be classroom deliberation...