teaching and student learning, and a commitment to maintain and refresh their
knowledge around this.
10.3.7 Using Evidence and Research-Informed Practices
While identification of the various forms of evidence available to teachers goes
some measure towards explaining the work of clinical teaching, the challenge for
teachers working in this paradigm is to incorporate different forms of evidence into
their practice to make best judged decisions to advance each student’s learning.
While processes of reasoning will be addressed in the following section, it is worth
emphasising here that a clinical teacher’s commitment to using evidence also means
that she/he collects evidence around impact of her/his own teaching, and uses this to
inform future teaching and their own professional learning. Clinical teachers
monitor and evaluate their impact regularly, seek to understand the reasons behind
what the evidence suggests, and make plans to maintain, change or learn further
about their practice based on these evaluations. It is important to note that this focus
on impact and on using evidence to improve teaching and learning is distinct from
often punitive approaches to teacher accountability driven by top-down political
imperatives (see Cochran-Smith and The Boston College Evidence Team 2009 );
rather, this analytical and reflective work is designed to develop teachers’agency
around evidence, and enable them to be both effective clinical teachers, and part of
a broader learning focussed profession. The notion that teachers’ability to draw on
various sources of evidence gives them access to a professional community is
something that has been elucidated by Sahlberg ( 2012 ), who argues that teachers
need to integrate‘scientific educational knowledge, didactics and practice in a
manner that enables [them] to enhance their pedagogical thinking, evidence-based
decision making and engagement in a scientific community of educators’( 2012 ,
p. 6).
10.4 Processes of Reasoning that Lead to Decision-Making
We now come to third tenet of clinical practice in education—the use of processes
of reasoning that lead to decision-making. Teachers use a range of specific and
broader reasoning processes to decide how to improve student learning. These
processes are described in various terms, including hypothesis-testing, problem
solving, critical thinking, and particularly as reflective practice. For more than a
century, Dewey’s conceptions of how teachers think using a reflective process have
had a distinctive influence in the educationfield. Education has a long history of
describing the key reasoning processes of teachers as reflective practice which
10 Clinical Practice in Education: Towards a Conceptual Framework 161