emphasises the reflective stage of thinking about practice within a cyclic model of
planning, acting, collecting, analysing and evaluating data to reflect and begin the
cycle again. The key dimension in all of these approaches is a foundational belief
that teaching is a profession that uses analyses to form judgment for action,‘rather
than the routinised application of learned repertoires’(Burn and Mutton 2013 , p. 4).
Significantly, three key theorists in education, John Dewey, Donald Schön and
David Boud all begin with a situation or experience and reasoning processes are
applied to the experience to develop professional knowledge. It is an event that is
the starting point. This is an important component of reasoning processes though it
lends itself to a focus on teaching without fully connecting reflection to the con-
sequences for learning. This longstanding reflective tradition is important in
improving practice, yet‘reflective practice often defaults to little more than lay
thinking’(Ure 2010 , p. 463) or trial and error. Reorienting teacher thinking to
clinical reasoning draws explicit attention to a focus on student learning informed
by evidence. This will consider ways in which different levels of evidence might be
used to identify areas of teacher knowledge that need to be extended and expanded,
for example, if a teacher is working with a student with a particular learning need
and his/her current interventions are not advancing learning, then seeking research
evidence to inform ensuing interventions is warranted. Clinical processes of rea-
soning are designated differently as clinical reasoning as it is centrally
student-focused, while not overlooking teaching.
We argue that clinical teaching uses clinical reasoning processes to make
decisions. Clinical reasoning describes the analytical processes that professionals
systematically use to decide on their course of action in a specific practice-based
context (Kriewaldt and Turnidge 2013 ). Teachers integrate knowledge of student
characteristics, curriculum frameworks, school and broader policy to frame their
clinical reasoning. The term clinical reasoning is sometimes used interchangeably
with clinical judgment or decision-making, though reasoning describes the process
and judgement describes the result. Thus clinical reasoning is a complex and
multifaceted process that professionals use to decide what the best judged action is
to take next. This cyclic system of reasoning comprises gathering evidence to form
a diagnosis, selecting and undertaking an intervention, evaluating and reflecting
upon the outcomes, and this cycle is then repeated. Clinical judgments are the result
of an unremitting focus on student learning and growth, and draw on evidence at
multiple stages in a cyclic process.
Clinical teaching uses processes of clinical reasoning to identify, collect and
analyse evidence to determine students’learning needs to plan and implement
teaching interventions. Subsequent clinical reasoning is employed to evaluate the
outcomes of teacher action using evidence and to initiate a new cycle of clinical
reasoning. Therefore clinical reasoning becomes situated in practice in which tea-
cher actions are the result of critical deliberations about options and predicted
effects. As we have argued, clinical teaching is learner-focussed and requires a
culture of evidence by ‘making evidence central to decision-making’
(Cochran-Smith and The Boston College Evidence Team 2009 , p. 458).
162 J. Kriewaldt et al.