Teaching Practices from a Theoretical Perspective

Teaching practices are important for understanding and improving educational processes. They are closely linked to the teachers' strategies for coping with challenges in their daily professional life and to their general well-being, and they shape the learning environment and influence learner motivation and achievement. This paper aimed to investigate teaching practices for professional development from the post positivist paradigm and social practice theories. This view focuses on learners as active participants in the process of acquiring knowledge. Teachers holding this view emphasize on facilitating student inquiry, prefer to give students the chance to develop solutions to problems on their own, and allow students to play an active role in instructional activities. This paper assessed practices theory in terms of the extent to which it is able to describe and explain the phenomena of professional learning and practice. This paper demonstrates that positivism provides a potentially useful epistemological tool in the discourse of the teachers' professional development.