Theorizing Teaching

Everyone from students who have spent years in classrooms to academics whose life work is the study of teaching thinks that they understand what teaching is. But do we really understand teaching? In some ways we do. We can all remember the extraordinary lessons or the boring ones and can give examples of when teachers did something that made everything clear, or clear as mud. But teaching is such a complex phenomenon that we can get drawn into peculiarities if we do not have a system that allows us to view those individual experiences in relation to each other. This is where theories come into play because they are the basis for systematically
understanding complex scientific phenomena. What are the important theories that enable the better understanding of teaching? During the course of our collaboration over the past years, we came to the realization that there is no clear answer to this
question. This led us to consider how we could initiate a process that might eventually lead to an answer. But let us start from the beginning. During a symposium in 2016, we were using different
observation frameworks