Self-study: the fifth commonplace.

This paper argues that there has been academic amnesia in the field of self-study with respect to the intellectual heritage underlying self-study as a way of understanding teaching practice. From Aristotle to Dewey, the concept of practical inquiry or deliberation has been a recurrent theme. However Schwab's exploration of the role of the 'practical' is the most significant in recent times in focusing attention on 'the teacher as knowledge creator' and interpreter of curriculum in classroom settings. This work is particularly important as it came at a time when educational research sought a place in the academy, and 'technical rationality' (Schon, 1983) was the vehicle for establishing that position. Schwab's characterisation of classroom practice, in terms of four commonplaces (the teacher, the student, the milieu, and the subject matter), highlighted the significance of the practical and paved the way for what we argue is the fifth commonplace: self-study.

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The emergence of self-study--sometimes referred to as teacher research or teacher inquiry--as a legitimate form of inquiry and valued source of knowledge about teaching is a relatively new phenomenon in educational research. This form of inquiry has made significant inroads in recent years at local, national, and international levels. Forums such as the Castle Conference (http://www.ku.edu/~sstep/castle.html), the American Educational Research Association 'Self Study of Teacher Education' special interest group (http://www.ku.edu/~sstep/) and the International Conference on Teacher Research (http://www.uwsp.edu/education/tr/) bear witness to this development. However self-study as a practice is not a new endeavour and a number of leading theoreticians from earlier times attempted to capture its nature and substance. Although their terminology was often different from that used today, we believe their contribution to understanding teaching practice is an important part of the intellectual heritage of self-study practitioners. In particular, we concur with Eisner (1984) in believing that many of the foundations for the current discussions of self-study can be attributed to the work of Joseph Schwab:

   [Schwab] helped initiate a trend that has grown in each subsequent
   year. That trend has been the humanization of educational inquiry;
   the exploration, development, and refinement of humanistic modes of
   inquiry for studying classrooms and conducting educational planning.
   His articles provide a sophisticated theoretical justification of
   the virtue and complexity of practical inquiry ...
   They explained why eclecticism was not a practical liability but a
   Necessary feature of the deliberative process and why
   deliberations--the exercise of the human's highest intellectual
   powers--was necessary in making decisions that always must suit
   changing contexts riddled with idiosyncracies. (p. 204)

The significance of Schwab's contribution lies in our contention that self-study is a defining feature of professional practice and, therefore, is necessarily a commonplace of that practice. To establish this claim, it is important first to appreciate how we view professional practice and self-study, and then how we relate these concepts to the context of teaching. This discussion lays the groundwork for a consideration of Schwab's contribution to the current zeitgeist in the study of teacher practice and our argument that self-study constitutes the fifth commonplace.

What is professional practice?

There are many definitions of professional practice and only in more recent times has teaching been considered a profession (Carnegie Forum, 1986; Gordon, 1994; Meek, 1998). Key dimensions common to all definitions include: specialised knowledge, intensive preparation, a code of conduct, an emphasis on continued learning, and the rendering of a public service (Brown 2001; Sachs, 1997; Sykes 1990). Important to our discussion here is the concept of 'continued learning' and its emergence in the teaching and teacher education literature.

Hargreaves (2000) charts four distinct phases over the past 100 years that illuminate the development of teaching as a profession: pre-professional, autonomous professional, collaborative professional, and the post-modern professional. In the first two phases, teachers are regarded primarily as technicians in the classroom. In the first of the two phases, teachers follow system-wide directives about particular teaching practices and, in the second phase, although given greater authority to select from among particular pedagogical strategies or approaches, teacher practices are carefully prescribed by those in positions of authority (superintendents of instruction, etc.). In both phases, the curriculum is 'a given' with little discretionary license on the part of the teacher to negotiate or modify it.

In phases three and four, we witness the emergence of inquiry as an element of teaching practice where the legitimacy of personal practical knowledge (Connelly & Clandinin, 1985) signals a shift in our appreciation of how teachers continue to learn about their profession and the role that self-study plays in informing their work as educators: 'teachers often learn best in their own professional communities ... on-site, built into ongoing relationships' (Hargreaves 2000, p. 165). In the third phase, collaboration among teachers enables authentic professional communities to develop in schools that investigate and respond to local problems and issues. In the fourth phase, the post-modern phase characterised by a recognition of complexity and uncertainty, Hargreaves argues that, now more than ever, it is imperative for teachers themselves to engage in systematic and sustained inquiry that 'lifts teachers out of the pre-professional prejudice that only practice makes perfect' (p. 167). Failure to do this, Hargreaves cautions, will result in deprofessionalisation forces wresting control of curricula and pedagogical practices from teachers (witness recent calls for 'centralized curricula, and testing regimes', p. 168).

Although Hargreaves warns of the political agenda that underlies any call for professional standards, there is almost universal agreement that self-study is an essential element of professional practice. For example, in the United States, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (2002) defines a teacher as one who is able to 'analyze classroom interactions, student work products, their own actions and plans in order to reflect on their practice and continually renew and reconstruct their goals and strategies'. In England, the General Teaching Council (2002) regards professional teachers as those who 'continually reflect on their own practice, improve their skills, and deepen their knowledge'. The Australian College of Educators, argues that it is incumbent upon members of the teaching profession to be 'reflective practitioners ... committed to their own professional development: seeking to deepen their knowledge, sharpen their judgment, expand their teaching repertoire, and to adapt their teaching to educationally sound developments arising from authentic research and scholarship' (Brock, 2000, p. 11). In short, for teaching to assume the mantle of a profession, there must be evidence that its members inquire into their own practice, into ways of improving and developing their teaching consistent with the unique contexts in which they work and the current research that pertains to their work as educators.

What is self-study?

   [Self-study is] a generally agreed upon set of insider research
   practices that promote teachers taking a close, critical look at
   their teaching and the academic and social development of their
   students ... [It] involves classroom teachers in a cycle of inquiry,
   reflection, and action. In this cycle, teachers question common
   practice, approach problems from new perspectives, consider research
   and evidence to propose new solutions, implement these solutions,
   and evaluate the results, starting the cycle anew. (Lewison, 2003,
   p. 100)

As Lewison indicates, self-study is research. We emphasise the word 'research' to deliberately signal that self-study is a systematic and rigorous process designed to explore and inform teacher knowledge and practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993) and to make aspects of this process public in some manner (Loughran, 2003). The word 'research' here is consistent with the type of activities that Hargreaves uses to delineate the pre-professional and professional phases in the history of teaching.

Self-study takes on many forms and includes practitioners at all levels of the educational enterprise. Underlying all forms is the analysis of one's own practice with all the attendant challenges and celebrations associated with such scrutiny. It is encouraging to see these issues prominent in the current teaching and teacher education literature--for example, Pritchard's (2002) and Zeni's (2001) analyses of the ethical issues in self-study. Self-study is also an active enterprise with outcomes more often represented as teacher knowing (where one's practice is always in a state of evolution) rather than teacher knowledge (where one's practice is viewed as relatively fixed and static).This shift is consistent with Hargreaves's rendering of the post-modern professional in teaching. It is no coincidence that paralleling the emergence of self-study as a legitimate form of research into teaching practice is the development of richer and more varied representational forms to capture the essence of self-study--forms that were unheard of in the educational literature 25 years ago. In fact, some of these forms are extremely difficult to represent in traditional text formats (Cole & McIntyre, 2001; Leggo, 2001;Weber & Mitchell, in press).

Mindful of Cochran-Smyth and Lytle's (1993) caution about the potential insularity of self-study practitioners, it is important that the knowledge and practices generated within these communities is shared across the broader educational community. Public dissemination is particularly important as self-study--largely a case-based literature--is enriched by peer commentary and critique. Although the issues surrounding public credibility and the dissemination of this work remain problematic, a crucial aspect of this dimension of self-study is negotiating the tension between one's own practice and the more public understandings of that practice (Loughran, 2003). Bullough and Pinnegar (2001), in their article on criteria for self-study research, highlight this juncture and the tension that it raises for self-study researchers:

   Quality self-study research requires that the researcher negotiate
   a particularly sensitive balance between biography and history ...
   such study does not focus on the self per se but on the space
   between self and the practice engaged in. There is always a tension
   between those two elements, self and the arena of practice, between
   self in relation to practice and the others who share the practice
   setting. (p. 15)

Self-study is a defining feature of professional practice

Sachs (1997) argues that inquiry is a hallmark of professional practice but, following Fullan (1993), worries that, at times, teachers become so preoccupied with pupil learning that they often neglect their own learning:

   One of the hallmarks of being identified externally as a
   professional is to continue learning throughout a career, deepening
   knowledge, skill judgment, staying abreast of important developments
   in the field and experimenting with innovations that promise
   improvements in practice (Sykes, 1990). Here lies one of the
   paradoxes for teacher professionalism for as Fullan (1993) notes, as
   a profession, we are not a learning profession. While student
   learning is a goal, often the continuing learning of teachers is
   overlooked. While continuous learning and the improvement of our
   practice should be at the core of teacher professionalism, in many
   instances this is not so. (Sachs 1997, p. 7)

We share this concern hut believe there is an important distinction between a preoccupation on student learning (e.g. planning, teaching, and evaluation) and a focus on how students learn. Schon (1988), among others, argues that the latter is the cornerstone of professional practice. He calls this process 'giving kids reason' (p. 19). It is a process whereby teachers are continuously alert to the ways in which students' actions and words provide glimpses in to how they construct and make sense of the world. We argue that a focus on how students learn is a necessary precursor to teachers being curious about their own practice. Indeed Schon's conceptualisation of 'reflective transformation' is strongly evocative of current self-study practices:

   We can encourage one another to tell stories about experiences that
   hold elements of surprise, positive or negative. Stories are
   products of reflection, but we do not usually hold onto them long
   enough to make them into objects of reflection in their own right.
   When we get into the habit of recording our stories, we can look at
   them again, attending to the meanings we have built into them and
   attending, as well, to our strategies for narrative description.
   When we can pay attention to the assumptions and ways of framing
   Experience ... [we] can see ourselves as builders of repertoires
   rather than accumulators of procedures and methods. (p. 26)

Thus, when inquiry is refrained in terms of how students learn, it becomes embedded in practice and teacher learning is a natural, even unavoidable, outcome. We are not claiming that student learning is the only object appropriate for teacher inquiry, as there are many other aspects of teaching practice that warrant inquiry, such as the structural and political contexts of teaching. Rather we are claiming that student learning is a critical aspect of all teachers' practice and as such represents an important focus of their work as educators. However, without inquiry, one's teaching practice becomes perfunctory and routinised. When teachers cease to be inquisitive about their practice, their practice ceases to be professional. This is an important distinction for us; as argued earlier, 'inquiry is a defining feature of professional practice', and distinguishes professional practice from labour or technical work.

Many recent authors illustrate this point (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993; Hamilton, 1998; Loughran & Russell, 2002). Their accounts demonstrate how self-studies are enacted and generate propositions that enhance, enrich, and transform teaching practice. These studies are carried out in the indeterminate, swampy zones of practice (Schon, 1987, p. 3) and the support of colleagues engaged in similar enterprises sustain on-going and critical engagement with the issues and challenges that such investigations present (Loughran, Mitchell, & Mitchell, 2002). Self-study authors' accounts confirm Hamilton and Pinnegar's (1998) observation that 'the multilayered, critically imbued, reality-ladened world is the text of the self-study scholars' (p. 235)--an observation no doubt familiar to the community of self-study scholars but, for a long time, rarely valued or recognised beyond the members of the self-study community itself. For a better understanding of how the community of self-study educators arrived at this focus on teaching as inquiry, we turn to the influence of Schwab's pioneering work on moving the focus of educational research from the technical to the practical.

Schwab's perspective on teacher inquiry

As suggested in the introduction to this article, there has been something of a collective amnesia in the self-study literature with respect to the foundational role played by Schwab. We think that he was responsible for drawing our attention to the importance of the processes of practical inquiry and deliberation with regards to a variety of educational issues. Although his later work tended to focus more on curriculum design and deliberation, there are many implications in his writings for carefully considering the nature of teaching and learning practices. In fact, in many ways he foreshadowed Schon's influential work on reflective practice, as both drew extensively from Dewey's pragmatic epistemological stance as well as his theory of inquiry. Why did Schwab's perspective and conceptual frame seem to disappear over the past 25 years from the self-study and teacher research community? We suspect it was a combination of factors and we will speculate about some of these factors. First, the time was not quite right for the type of open-ended and situational inquiry that Schwab was proposing. Quantitative traditions in educational research, as well as the broader social science community, were still dominant and Schwab's focus on the practical was out of step with this view of knowledge and inquiry. Second, he tended to focus much of his later writing on issues and problems of curriculum design and development and many educators did not see the implications of this work for other areas of educational inquiry. Finally, he used a very opaque form of language, one that was not very accessible nor communicative to teachers or to many educational researchers. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, some of Schwab's central commitments and concepts, such as the importance of the ongoing, multi-faceted process of deliberation, the nature of practical inquiry into the problems of teaching practice, and the consideration of the commonplaces in educational practice, are central to an analysis of current issues of self-study and teacher inquiry. We outline our interpretation of his influence on the field and conclude by arguing for the additional 'commonplace'.

Schwab's enduring focus on the importance of dialogue and deliberation stems from his strong commitment to action accompanied by reflection on those actions--a disposition that can be traced back to his avid reading of Aristotle and Dewey. Although he claimed that the reflective process could be accomplished at the individual level, he argued that the deliberation within a 'learning community' (Schwab, 1975, 1976) was a more powerful means for generating the necessary insights to deal with many educational problems. Shulman (1984) expresses Schwab's argument in this regard succinctly: 'The virtues of heterogeneity of group membership, of the diverse contributions and perspectives uniquely brought to bear by members of a collaborating group, are forcefully drawn' (p. 185). Thus we see the precursor to much of the contemporary work in 'learning communities' (cf. Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1993; Brown & Campione, 1992)--a concept that has become so popular in the educational, social science, and popular literature that a Google search reveals over 550 000 documents or websites which employ that term.

It is the latter two of these commitments--practical inquiry and the notion of commonplaces--that we think are most germane to the community of self-study educators. Schwab's perspective of 'the practical' was the subject of a series of four papers written over a period of 14 years from 1969 to 1983, and it is at the centre of his work on the nature of inquiry into problems of the human condition, particularly those focused on the design of curriculum and the associated pedagogical practices. Much sooner than most curriculum theorists, Schwab recognised that the field of curriculum inquiry was more complex and contested than simply designing new curriculum materials and accompanying instructional resources. He wrote about the 'situated nature of curriculum knowledge' and the crucial role of teacher as an active creator of knowledge as opposed to a passive transmitter of pre-determined curriculum outcomes. The complexity of translating curricular intents into classroom actions and practices led him to propose the four 'commonplaces' of pedagogical practice--the learner, the teacher, the educational milieu, and the subject matter.

Focus on the practical: Schwab's four commonplaces

In the introduction to a book of collected essays by Schwab, Westbury and Wilkof (1978) suggest that he may have borrowed the notion of a commonplace from 'the classical rhetorical tradition of inventio. In its original context, this method consisted of a comprehensive mapping of a territory of a given subject matter by means of a set of topics or commonplaces [italics in original] which ordered the possibilities that an orator might need to consider as he sought to develop his arguments' (p. 9).

Substituting teacher for orator, we can see the parallels in terms of a teachers' practice as they invent, or improvise (Yinger, 1990) actions during their numerous engagements with their students and their colleagues in a given milieu or setting. Clearly teachers, and researchers inquiring into teaching, need to consider these commonplaces for the similar purpose of 'ordering the possibilities' of their own actions and inquiry. So for Schwab (1973):

   The curriculum constructed of these particulars will be brought to
   bear, not in some archtypical classroom, but in a particular locus
   in time and space with smells, shadows, seats, and conditions
   outside its walls which may have much to do with what is achieved
   inside. Above all, the supposed beneficiary is not the generic
   child, not even a class or kind of child out of the psychological
   or sociological literature pertaining to the child. The beneficiary
   will consist of very local kinds of children and, within the local
   kinds, individual children. (p. 502)

The first commonplace identified by Schwab (1973) is the 'learner'; teachers must be familiar with the learners who are to be the 'beneficiaries of the curricular operation ... It must include general knowledge of the age group under consideration: what it already knows, what it is ready to learn, what will come easy, what will be difficult' (p. 502). Therefore good teaching requires educators actively to seek out the aspirations and anxieties that may affect student learning: 'This is required in order to know the ways in which this unique group of children depart from generalities about similar children of the same age' (p. 502). Therefore knowledge of 'the particular' in combination with 'the general' underpins Schwab's first commonplace. The second commonplace is the 'teacher'. For Schwab, good teaching practice is embedded in a deep and conscious knowledge of the value positions that shape and give meaning to one's pedagogical practice coupled with a repertoire of and curiosity for different approaches and strategies that enhance learning in one's classroom. This commonplace emphasises that teachers are active constructors of curriculum and not merely automatons who implement curriculum, and that they critically reflect upon their belies and actions as educators. Shulman succinctly summarises Schwab's image of the teacher whose 'responsible practice of the art of teaching requires that teachers reserve to themselves the obligation to make decisions and choices regarding "what to do, how to do it, with whom and at what pace" [italics added] (Shulman, 1983) because these options arise hundreds of times in a school day and arise differently every day and with every group of students' (Shulman, 1984, p. 190). We will return to this description of teachers' practical judgements as entailing the 'what', 'how', 'with whom' and 'at what pace' when we contemplate a fifth commonplace.

The 'educational milieu' constitutes the third commonplace. This commonplace is multi-dimensional and includes 'the school and the classroom ... the family, the community, the particular groups of religious, class, or ethic genus' (Schwab, 1973, p. 502). Schwab argues that understanding the various influences on a child is essential to the act of teaching. When teachers ignore the contexts which comprise a learner's world ('a dominant anti-intellectualism, a focus on material acquisition, a high value on conformity to a nationwide pattern' (p. 504), not only do they do a disservice to the learner but they find themselves in the untenable position of attempting to mediate a learner's existing conceptions with the curriculum imperatives of the particular subject they are teaching. This leads us to the fourth commonplace: 'subject matter'. 'There must be someone familiar with the scholarly materials under treatment and with the discipline from which they come' (p. 502). This commonplace reminds us that there are bodies of knowledge that teachers must be aware of and conversant with if they are to fulfil their mandate as educators. For example, is it sufficient for an educator who is responsible for teaching early literacy to draw only on their experiences as a child when they were learning to read? Although this experience may be useful, these educators must continually update their understanding of literacy education by being familiar with new research and practices in this area.

Therefore, for Schwab, defensible educational thought must take account of all four commonplaces--the learner, the teacher, the milieu, and the subject matter. 'None of these can be omitted without omitting a vital factor in educational thought and practice. No one of them may be allowed to dominate the deliberation unless that domination is conscious and capable of defense in terms of circumstances' (p. 509). He points to the perils associated with allowing one commonplace to dominate the other by using the example of curriculum bandwagons: 'Indeed, the short merry life of many bandwagon curriculums has often arisen from just such overemphases: the child-centre curriculums of Progressivism, the social-change centred curriculums of the 1930s, the subject-matter centred curriculums of recent reforms, and the teacher-centre curriculums that arise from unionism' (p. 509).

Therefore all four commonplaces underpin the decision-making processes of teaching and learning in classrooms. Each is of equal importance for the way in which educators make sense of and enact their practice. Indeed, Schwab uses the notion of commonplaces to highlight those elements essential for reasoned and reasonable judgements about teaching. However we argue that Schwab was only partly correct when he characterised teaching as having four commonplaces: for teaching to occur, someone (a teacher) must be teaching someone (a student) about something (a curriculum) at some place and some time (a milieu). There is, and always has been, a fifth commonplace. For teaching to occur, there must be a 'somehow', a way for an educator to know, recognise, explore, and act upon his or her practice. For us, that somehow is self-study.

Self-study--the fifth commonplace

The recent ascent of self-study as a legitimate form of inquiry in education research is not due to its sudden adoption by practitioners in the field; self-study has always been an important element of their professional practice. Theoreticians who have recognised the significance of self-study have drawn upon a series of related concepts to articulate this dimension of professional practice. The early works of Dewey (1916) focusing on 'deliberation" and more recently Schon (1983) on 'reflection' are two such examples. Other examples include Connelly and Clandinin's (1986) focus on 'personal practical knowledge', Fenstermacher's (1994) development of the notion of 'practical arguments', and Grimmett and MacKinnon's (1992) work on 'craft knowledge'. For each of these writers, inquiring into and acting upon curiosities, challenges, and surprises that arise from one's teaching constitute the hallmark of professional practice.

Self-study, the fifth common place, is a cornerstone to professional practice; it is the life-blood of the teaching and learning dynamic. It constitutes in part the continuing quest to seek viable responses and appropriate actions to the questions of: what to do, how to do it, with whom, and at what pace. Without this commonplace, teaching becomes repetitive not reflective--merely the duplication of models and strategies learned elsewhere and brought to bear unproblematically in one's classroom. Although self-study may not have been recognised as a commonplace, and indeed, as late as the 1980s, many educational researchers still cast teachers as merely technicians (Erickson, 1986; Nolau & Huber, 1989; Selman, 1988), we contend that largely through self-study have teachers come to know, problematise, and improve their work as professionals. The change that occurred in the academy in the 1970s and 1980s was the recognition that practitioners possessed a legitimate form of knowledge, constructed while making the judgements to deal with the above questions hundreds of times in a school day. However, the academy's early efforts to capture and represent these forms of teacher knowledge proved to be extremely difficult, if not impossible (personal communication, Chris Clark, 1990).

An alternative grass roots approach to the problem of making explicit the nature of teachers' judgements and knowledge was to involve the teachers directly in their own inquiries into their practice. These efforts were typically collaborative projects with teachers and academics and were described as 'action research' or 'teacher research' (Carr & Kemmis, 1982; Cochrane--Smith & Lytle, 1993; Stenhouse, 1975). This form of inquiry into one's own practice subsequently was extended from classrooms in the schools to classrooms and contexts in the academy and the field, and came to be described as 'self-study' (Hamilton, 1998; Loughran, Hamilton, La Boskey, & Russell, 2004).

Therefore the emergence of self-study on the landscape of teaching and teacher education has more to do with the politics of knowledge as it is played out within the academy rather than its practice by teachers in their daily engagement with learners in classrooms. This is not a trivial point and, as discussed elsewhere (Clarke, 2001), bears further scrutiny to understand why self-study is now receiving so much attention.

The significance of self-study in our own work as teacher educators prompted us seven years ago to develop an experimental teacher education program at the University of British Columbia with professional inquiry as one of its central constructs--a construct that features in the name given to this experimental program: Community and Inquiry for Teacher Education (CITE). Each year the CITE program is comprised of a cohort of 36 students undertaking their 12-month B.Ed. elementary program (www.educ.ubc.ca/courses/cite). A review of teacher education programs around the world reveals that there are many criteria upon which student teachers are judged to have reached a level of competence in teaching--for example, independence, confidence, self-assuredness, etc. Although these are important attributes, in keeping with our belief that self-study is a defining feature of professional practice, there is one attribute that often seems the antithesis of these, but one that we value just as highly: the ability of our students to entertain uncertainty. Therefore, across the CITE program--in all coursework and practicum experiences--our students are divided into inquiry groups to promote and support self-study of their emerging practices as beginning teachers. Following Lave and Wegner (1991), we believe that beginners must be engaged in the mature practices of the profession at the outset of their career if they are to become fully participating members of that profession. Self-study is a defining feature, a commonplace, of the mature practices of the teaching profession, and therefore a necessary component of the CITE program. If, in the minds and practices of our beginning teachers, self-study is viewed as a commonplace of their profession, then they become critical consumers of educational innovations introduced by others and also active constructors of teaching and curricular practices within their own classrooms, schools, and communities. The combination of these two, critical consumer and active constructor, signals an epistemological and ontological shift in our understanding of teacher education that, foreshadowed for some time by the various authors cited earlier, only now is beginning to reshape how teachers' knowledge is defined and enacted within the educational community.

To conclude, we have argued that self-study is, and always has been, a defining feature of professional practice. That is, self-study is not a new phenomenon in the field of education. However some conceptualisations of teaching, particularly those held by people who have been regarded as authorities on education, have not recognised, valued, or appreciated the central role that self-study plays within the profession. These authorities have either unwittingly or deliberately discouraged such activities. Even today, efforts to control classroom practices and to have teachers conform to a set of prescribed behaviours ignores the importance of the unique contexts that define and shape their work as educators. We are indebted to those who have sought to characterise the importance of self-study within the profession. In particular, we believe that Schwab's (1978a, 1978b, 1978e) seminal papers on 'The practical' left an indelible mark on the profession. His contribution can be found in the works by Clandinin, Connelly, Elbaz, Eisner, Fenstermacher, and Shulman, to name a few, all of whom research and write about the importance the 'some how' in teaching. It is for this reason that we believe Schwab's four commonplaces fall short of capturing the complete essence of professional practice even though his rendering of the practical suggests otherwise. We, therefore, submit that there is a fifth commonplace--the somehow of teaching--and that commonplace is self-study.

Keywords

classroom environment curriculum reflective teaching self evaluation (individuals) teacher education teaching process

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Anthony Clarke is a teacher educator at the University of British Columbia, and Gaalen Erickson is Director of the Centre for the Study of Teacher Education in the Department of Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 1Z4, Canada. E-mail: [e-mail] [e-mail]