A common claim, often heard from teachers themselves, is that teaching is atheoretical. The argument runs that what teachers do in classrooms is craft, judgement, and experience, not theory. Theory is for academics. Practice is what counts.
There may be an element of truth in this, however the claim, taken at face value, is wrong, and the way it is wrong matters.
Every teaching decision rests on a theory of learning
Every teaching decision you make rests on an assumption about how people learn. When you ask a question and wait for a hand to go up, you are acting on a theory. When you set a worked example to be copied, you are acting on a theory. When you put pupils into mixed-attainment groups, or set them by prior attainment, or hand them a writing frame, you are acting on a theory. The theory may not be named. It may not be examined. But it is there.
In other words, teaching is never atheoretical. More often, it is theory that has gone underground.
This is not a new insight. Schön (1983) called it knowing-in-action. Eraut (1994) called it tacit professional knowledge. The label matters less than the point. The things skilled practitioners do without thinking are saturated with assumptions about how the world works - and specifically about how people learn.
Why implicit theory is a problem
If your theory is tacit, you cannot interrogate it. You cannot ask whether the evidence still supports it. You cannot notice when your stated values pull one way and your habits pull the other - when there is misalignment between your beliefs and values and your practice. You cannot, with any precision, change what you are doing.
There is a further consequence. When your own theory is invisible to you, somebody else's theory will fill the gap. The textbook has a theory. The exam specification has a theory. The EdTech app has a theory baked into its interface, in the form of what it makes easy and what it makes hard. The behaviour policy has a theory. If you have not made your own pedagogical stance explicit, you will end up, by default, enacting whichever theory is loudest in the materials in front of you.
How we got here
There is a structural reason for this. As I argued in 'Is teaching a profession?' (Twining, 2014), initial teacher education has been progressively narrowed. The time once spent on learning about learning theory and educational philosophy has been compressed to make room for training in particular techniques (eg. synthetic phonics). The effect, over time, has been a teaching workforce that is highly skilled in specific moves but less well placed to articulate the account of learning that those moves presuppose.
This is not a criticism of teachers. It is a criticism of how teachers have been prepared. The shift from teacher education to teacher training has had real costs. One of them is the gradual disappearance of theory as something teachers are expected to engage with consciously.
Making theory visible
A PedTech approach starts from a different place. As set out in From EdTech to PedTech (Aubrey-Smith and Twining, 2024), it asks you to name your pedagogical stance before you design anything. Not because pedagogical stances are a luxury once the lesson plan is sorted, but because every subsequent decision (what activity, what grouping, what technology, what assessment) follows from it. I have unpacked this in a recent post on the misconception that lesson design starts with the learning intention.
Naming your pedagogical stance is also what makes critique possible. In an earlier post I set out key defining elements of four main 'learning theories' (Traditional, Individual Constructivist, Social Constructivist, and Sociocultural) and in a companion post I worked through their relative strengths and weaknesses. The point of these posts is to give you something concrete enough to position yourself against, agree with, push back on, or refine.
So is teaching atheoretical?
No. It never is. The key question is whether your theory is one you have chosen, examined, and can defend, or one you have inherited without noticing. The first is a foundation for professional practice. The second is a vulnerability and undermines the notion of teaching being a profession.
References
Aubrey-Smith, F., and Twining, P. (2024). From EdTech to PedTech: Changing the Way We Think About Digital Technology. Routledge.
Eraut, M. (1994). Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence. Falmer Press.
Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Basic Books.
Twining, P. (2014). Is teaching a profession? The halfbaked.education blog.