From “Teacher as Decision Maker” to Teacher as Participant in “Shared Decision Making”: Reframing the Purpose of Social Foundations in Teacher Education

This article explores how the idea of shared decision making can be used to reframe the purpose of social foundations in teacher education. Recent research shows that foundations educators need to find more effective ways of articulating the value of social foundations. The challenge is to make effective connections between the content of social foundations and the practical work of the individual “teacher as decision maker,” and yet to do so without losing attention to issues of social context and moral purpose that define the field of social foundations. The argument here is that the idea of shared decision making can help bridge this gap between the idea of teacher as decision maker and the content of foundational studies. The article takes an empirical approach to this argument, looking at what leading studies from the literature on educational decision making suggest about the value of social foundations for the work of teachers. Four studies in particular provide the core illustrations for this analysis, each representing a different level of educational decision making, and thus a different context for teacher involvement in education issues.