What if … ? Exploring thought experiments and non-rehearsing teachers’ development of adaptive expertise in rehearsal debriefs

Recent critiques of practice-based teacher education raise concerns about reducing pedagogy to acontextual procedures and decentering teacher reasoning. Building on our model of non-rehearsing teachers’ development of adaptive expertise in rehearsal debriefs, we examine thought experiments as a mechanism for pedagogical reasoning and resisting prescription. Non-rehearsing teachers’ thought experiments were characterized by discussions of what could have happened or might happen under different conditions or contexts. We examine four interrelated types of thought experiments and consider the role of position. Results suggest that thought experiments function as bridges between the simplification of rehearsals and the complexity of practice in context.