Improving teaching by fostering educational judgment: Roles for dialogue and imagination

For most of the last fifty years efforts to improve teaching have emphasized direct links between various forms of knowledge and improved practice. In contrast, I contend that understanding teaching practice as the exercise of educational judgment is a better way to understand teaching. Ironically, for a profession concerned with making decisions affecting the lives of others, judgment is an under-theorized topic in education. The study of human judgment, however, has a 2400-year history in Western scholarship, beginning with Plato and Aristotle, through Kant, to the relatively recent work of Arendt (1978), Gadamer (1960/1996) and Habermas (1992/1996). I report on my efforts to develop and use an Arendtian framework--with its concern for particular forms of dialogue and imagination--to understand teaching as the exercise of educational judgment.