In Norway the PPT (Norwegian abbreviation for Educational-Psychological Service) is an important agency cooperating with schools and teachers both to identify pupils with special needs, and to guide teachers who have these pupils in their classes. Furthermore the national authorities want the service to cooperate with schools to prevent further growth in the amount of special needs pupils. (In 2012-2013 8.6 per cent of Norwegian compulsory school’s pupils were defined to be pupils with special needs.) Even if the PPT's formal competence is relatively high, both the national government and the service itself have expressed the need to raise the service’s competence level even higher, particularly in fields that many Norwegian teachers experience to be particularly demanding. One such field is ‘classroom management and learning environment.’

In the autumn of 2011, 30 PPT counsellors participated in a university course to study this topic. The course, on the Master’s degree level, was organized as three sessions of three days each. In each session there were lecturers presenting theories connected to classroom management and learning environment, peer- and group-work connected to the topic in question, individual reflections and plenary discussions of if or how the theories could be related to their practice.

One of the course requirements was that the participants had to write individual journals after each session. They were asked to reflect in their journals on how they understood the topics and content covered in the session and their own learning benefits. After each session the handwritten journal was submitted to the head of the course. When the journals were later typed into a file using Times New Roman font size 12, they came to a total of 54 pages. The course participants gave their consent to using this document for research purposes.

In literature on the analysis of qualitative data, it is recommended that the researcher should start with carefully reading of all collected information to get a sense of the overall data (see for example Creswell 2013). In this initial analytic process, it became apparent that the PP counsellors to a great degree were focused on the theories introduced to them. The aim of this paper is to explore how the PP counsellors reflected on the theories presented in the course. Contrary to for example research on student teachers’ (Haugan, Moen & Karlsdottir 2012) and experienced teachers’ concern with theory (Moen 2009, Postholm 2008), we have not found any research on PP counsellors’ concern with theory, something which is the main reason for investigating this particular topic.

Vygotsky (1978) stated that the capacity for human learning and development depends on the knowledge and mastery of mediational means or “tools.” Theory and theoretical concepts connected to classroom management and learning environment are such tools. With this overall theoretical framework, useful concepts in the analysis of the data are reflection, proflection and reproflection (Postholm & Moen 2010), forceful reflection (Søndenå 2004), empirical reflexive mediation and theoretical reflexive mediation (Dalsgaard 2007), and primary and secondary artefact (Wartofsky 1979).

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