Discussion of teacher education too often degenerates into a false dichotomy between the claims of theory and practice. In "Quality Teaching," Edgar Stones breaks through that sterile debate by focusing on teachers as inquirers who try to solve pedagogical problems and who draw on all the educational, psychological, theoretical, and practical resources at their disposal.
By detailed analysis of numerous case studies of novice and experienced teachers grappling with real classroom problems, Stones shows that true quality teaching is only achieved by sensitivity to the interplay between the processes by which children acquire knowledge, the structure of knowledge within the subject being taught, and the whole context in which the teaching is being done. He makes available to teachers and student teachers a whole body of empirically based psychological knowledge on concept learning, problem solving, and the learning of physical skills and shows for the first time how this knowledge can inform and at the same time be refined by what happens in the classroom. Throughout, his aim is to support teachers as explorers in pedagogy and active problem solvers, guided but not limited by theoretical insights from the study of human learning.