Teachers have to make their judge and decide improvisatorially and interactively during their lesson every day.  Such teacher’s thinking process has been investigated as an interactive decision-making process.  Peterson & Clark’s (1978) model and Shavelson & Stern’s (1981) model are representative as a teacher’s decision-making model, which based on human information process model.  Their models explained the decision-making process as finding cue and selecting behavior.  Yoshizaki (1990) pointed out a following shortcoming of their models: 1) the lack of the multiplicity of cue, 2) without including the relation with teacher’s knowledge or schema, 3) without describing the relation between decision and teaching plan.  He made a new model linking decision-making with teacher’s knowledge, but his model also based on information process model.  The past many research on teacher’s decision-making in class found out that expert’s thinking process is different from novice’s.  However, most teacher education programs based on the decision-making model and research have not been successful for student teachers and schoolteachers.  Accordingly, we need to investigate teacher’s thinking process in class from different perspective. Furthermore, we also should consider how to use the findings and the theoretical framework for teacher education program.

   Weick (1997) claimed that thinking process could be recognized as making sense process.  The concept of “sensemaking” by Weick focused on identification problem from undifferentiated situation.  The most important thing is that he/she creates the “situation” by him/herself through acting .  In other words, his/her problems are not given, but created by himself/herself.  In this regard, this concept has different focus from the concept of decision-making that focuses on the process to select the proper solution.  Sensemaking looks like the concept of “story” by Bruner (2002).  In both concepts, creating plausible story for an agent’s identity is meaningful, not objective and rational in the light of one’s knowledge.  In this article, we would like to use the concept of sensemaking because Weick focused on the relation between story and behavior more than Bruner.  Furthermore, Weick’s concept has a possibility to teach as Yamori (2006, 2009) developed the new card game for growing the sensemaking process according to his research on the process of sensemaking by civic leaders in dealing with a serious disaster.  Namely, though decision-making in teaching was hard to teach, sensemaking in teaching can be taught in teacher education program.

  However, there are few studies about teacher’s sensemaking in class though the number of studies on sensemaking in education has been increasing, for example, sensemaking in school management by a principal (Usui, 2001; Ingle et al.,2011) and sensemaking among teachers in professional learning community (Coburn, 2001). Certainly, although there are also some studies about teacher’s awareness (noticing) and interpretation, which are similar to sensemaking, they focus on the structure of teacher’s cognition rather than the relation between awareness and behavior (König et al.,2014;  Seidel and Stürmer, 2014).

  As above mentioned, the purpose of this study is to make a new model of teacher’s thinking process in teaching.  For this purpose, we need to take a close look at teacher’s thinking process in actuality.  In this study, we describe teacher’s actual thinking process from the perspective of sensemaking, and explore about what the teacher’s sensemaking process is.

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