What is Teacher Thinking

The purpose of this chapter is to define gifted practitioners, to describe how they develop, and to show how their development can be fostered. Gifted practitioners are teachers who have continued to grow in their practice until they have become widely recognized as extraordinary teachers. The authors begin by examining the creative process, then showing how the creative process and teacher development are very similar processes. Both involve tacit learning through experience, the discovery of new ideas by making tacit knowledge explicit, and the further development of those ideas through design and evaluation. These ideas will be used as a basis for fostering giftedness in teaching. A case example will be used to provide an illustration of the gifted practitioner, followed by a discussion of the implications for the profession of teaching.