Teacher know-how has been conceptualised from several perspectives: (A) A normative perspective that focuses on aims and dimensions of education, (B) an institutional perspective that reflects upon conditions of centralisation and de-centralisation of school systems, and (C) a competency perspective that refers to demands of competitiveness and effectiveness (Hargreaves 2000; Day 2002). The competency perspective currently predominant in educational research established a regime of testing and centralised curricula (Biesta 2012), which has been problematized since it fragments teacher knowledge into competency domains (Mena Marcos 2009), conceptualises know-how as an entity that can be distilled from practice and represented as evidence, and neglects that professionalism resides within a person (Geerinck, Masschelein & Simons 2010). Problems identified in the competency perspective urge us to re-conceptualise know-how, its development, and its relationship with codified research knowledge. Once alternative conception has been proposed from a post-critical perspective, which argues for a radical distinction of codified knowledge, personal knowledge and practical know-how (Neuweg & Fothe 2011; Wieser 2016): From a post-critical perspective, teaching can be framed as a contextual expression of know-how. However, observations of know-how do not provide insights into its development. A teacher may develop orientations by looking into evidence from research, but also through reflection on teaching experiences. The development of know-how for teaching needs to be conceptualised to ground research on professional development, and the notion of technologies of the self as developed by Foucault offers a perspective to refine the conception of professional development. Technologies of the self are ‘reflected and voluntary practices by which men not only fix rules of conduct for themselves but seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their particular being’ (Foucault 2005, 61). This ‘change of being’ is a development that takes place through a transformation of orientations for teaching, a quest in which a teacher explores the relationship of herself and events that took place in her classroom, which includes a personal “way of considering things”, “a certain form of attention”, and “a number of actions exercised on the self” of a teacher by herself in order to “take responsibility for oneself” (Foucault 2005, 10-11). This talk explores how a teacher uses these technologies to develop her awareness of a classroom and its contexts – through conversation, keeping a diary, reviewing events, and making comparisons (Foucault 1988, IV), and how she, through these technologies, develops her know-how.

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