The Teacher as a Reflective Practitioner in a School Cooperative Culture.

This study describes characteristics of reflective practical teaching, interprets the value of intellectualizing teaching by teachers, and summarizes a successful teaching/learning research process in the context of a large urban school in Spain. Data were gathered through review of curriculum documents and observations, interviews, and written reflections of 29 teachers. Findings are summarized in three major dimensions: the school as the institutional framework of change; the instructional dimension, which offers case studies of the visions, voices, and epistemological versions of the work design and life in the classrooms; and the curricular dimension, which involved matrices of practical reasoning and the personal, intuitive, and improved knowledge of teachers. Two main hypotheses were verified: (1) teachers' pedagogical practical knowledge, individually considered, showed some evidence of the diversity and multiplicity of their implicit theories to design instructional action; and (2) teachers'"grounded theories" also denoted and supported the idea that their reflective teaching was related to a cooperative school culture. (Contains 35 references.) (JDD)