Spielraum and Teaching

Abstract

In recent years, reflection-in-action has been a major concept for taking account of the craft and practical aspects of teaching. Yet in the everyday teaching praxis, reflection is largely absent. In this paper, we argue that this absence is due to the fact that reflection requires objects of thought that have to be constructed. Both the construction and manipulation of these objects requires “time out” from acting in real time. Taking time out is frequently impossible in the praxis of teaching, unless we want to miss the “teachable moments.” We propose Spielraum, room to maneuver, as a concept that describes the reality of teaching much better than reflection-in-action, especially when there is no time out for reflection. We use two extended classroom episodes to exemplify situations that are better described by the notion of Spielraum than by reflection-in-action.