Although its emphasis in teaching a practice may vary across professions, students must learn the practical reasoning appropriate to their future work. To uphold the telos of their profession, they must be able to reason about possible changes over time and solve problems as they arise. In nursing, for example, clinical reasoning is a form of practical reasoning, where nurses reason across time about a patient’s situation, or as the nurse’s understanding of the patient’s situation changes. Professional practice is always underdetermined and practitioners must be able to reason through an infinite variety of scenarios about a patient’s situation and then act according to the particular values, goals, and assumptions of the profession. In nursing, students learn to reason across time by developing a clinical imagination or the ability to imagine different outcomes as the occasion or the nurse’s knowledge changes. Drawing on international peer-reviewed journal articles and major books published from 2005-2010, this paper will review and discuss the current literature on practical reasoning in professional education more generally and focus on nursing as a case study.