Pergamon Teaching and Teacher Education, VSI. 13, No. 7, pp. 757-773, 1997 © 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain 0742-051X{97 S17.00 + 0.00 PII: SO742-O51X(97)O0021-8 VARIETIES OF WISDOM IN THE PRACTICE OF TEACHERS ALLAN FELDMAN University of Massachusetts, U.S.A. There is great concern in many countries in the world about the way that children are being educated. This concern has been expressed in striking and elegant ways, and many have set goals to address what frequently has been called a crisis. At this time in the United States national organizations and many of the states have developed standards against which the problem can be measured and progress towards the goals evaluated. These standards, and their associated sets of assessments, look at curri- culum, learning, teaching, and teacher educa- tion. It should be clear that if these standards and assessments are to be valid, the writers and developers need to have a solid understanding of the aspects of schooling for which they are written. In the case of teaching and teacher education, which is my focus in this paper, views from two perspectives have guided the writers. The first, which I call the teacher knowledge perspective, focuses on what it is that individuals need to know in order to teach. The second, the teacher reasoning perspective, focuses on the ways that teachers make decisions about their practice through reflection. While the context within which the teacher acts is an important consideration in each of these models, and in particular the knowledge base can be envisioned as a compen- dium that exists in Popper's World 3 (Popper, 1972), the teacher as individual is the locus of decision making in both of these models. A third perspective can also be found in the research literature, although it has had little influence on the policy makers. That perspec- tive goes beyond the individual cognitive models of the teacher knowledge and reasoning perspectives to take a broader, sociocultural and social constructivist view of teaching, teachers, and teacher education. In this paper I argue that standards for, and assessments of teaching that rely solely on these perspectives are incomplete. I suggest that a fourth perspective, teaching as a way of being, which extends the sociocultural perspec- tive, can lead to a more comprehensive picture of what it means to be a teacher. This perspec- tive rejects computational models of the mind while looking closely at how teachers act within their educational situations to improve their practice and to come to understand it better. Teaching, as conceptualized in the teacher as a way of being perspective, is highly contextualized and is situated socially, spatially, and temporally in teachers' practice. What I propose in this paper is a model of teaching and what it means to be a teacher. Rather than rejecting the teacher knowledge, teacher reasoning, and sociocultural perspec- tives, the model accepts their strengths and builds upon them. The result is a conception of teacher expertise that envisions good teaching as wise practice, where wisdom comes in several varieties. There is the wisdom of practice that can be codified in a knowledge base for teaching, the deliberative wisdom that grows through reflection, and the wisdom-in-practice that develops through authentic being in educa- tional situations. This model recasts expertise from the accumulation of knowledge and reasoning and reflection upon action, to a complex set of ways of thinking about what it means to be a wise teacher. The result is an 757