School Didactics And Learning: a school Didactic Model Framing An Analysis of Pedagogical Implication of Learning Theory

within
a pedagogical conceptual structure. It must also be
evident that educational research must be interested in what 
determines
our possibilities of reaching
competence. In other words, the question must be how the teacher 
gets
the learner to learn rather than how
the learner learns, as Koskenniemi (1978, p.71) has emphasized.
2. DIDACTICS AND THE TSL PROCESS
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Research on teaching should thus develop a 
theory
of didactics, not be limited to developing instructional
principles which guide practice. These two different ways of approaching pedagogical-educational reality
can be visualized by 
Fig. 2.10
.
The point of departure of this model is pedagogical practice.
The first relation (1) in the figure refers to what has been called the descriptive or analytic theory of
didactics as already explained.
The second relation (2) between psychological theory and pedagogical practice is an example of
prescriptive or normative didactics. Research into this relation usually leads to principles which guide
practice, i.e. principles of how teachers should act in order to be good teachers. Even though such principles
may be used as analytic instruments as well, i.e. in order to investigate to what extent teachers follow these
principles, they are, as such, all too narrow to function as theories of teaching. Sometimes instructional
psychology is used as a term denoting the field of research which identifies relations between learning
theory and instructional theory (Glaser, 1987).
The third relation (3) in 
Fig. 2.10
concerns the relation between educational and psychological theory. The
view adopted in the present study is that pedagogical principles developed on the basis of psychological
theory must be handled by educational theory. This means that educational theory may incorporate the kind
of pedagogical developmental work that aims at the development of principles for instruction. Educational
research is thus not limited to constructing conceptual systems aimed at analysing pedagogical reality. In
order to carry out such developmental work, the theory of didactics must contain conceptual instruments for
showing what role such developmental work may have for educational theory and what role these principles
may have with respect to pedagogical practice. According to this view educational research includes
research-based developmental work which aims at creating principles for teaching. The third relation in
Fig. 2.10
should be understood to indicate that psychological questions constitute a part of educational
research. How psychological questions are to be dealt with must, however, be decided within the framework
of educational theory (Harva, 1965, p. 21).
A fundamental question is thus what a didactic theory should be like, in order to create possibilities for
both (a) analysis of and reflection on the constituents of pedagogical reality and (b) the creation of
pedagogical principles aimed at guiding practice based on e.g. psychology. The kernel of this problem is
that of normativity; since a principle guiding practice is always normative or prescriptive in nature, we must
ask how such a principle can be related to analytic or descriptive theory. Is it thus possible for an
educational theory to be analytic and normative at the same time? Or is educational theory always
normative? If educational theory is normative, then the question is whether it can be accepted as a scientific
theory. Should we, in other words, accept a position like Brezinka’s (1978), according to which the
FIG. 2.10. Two different perspectives on pedagogical practice: educational theory and psychological theory.
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SCHOOL DIDACTICS AND LEARNING

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normative ideological part of education belongs to philosophy and the pedagogical practice is always non-
theoretical practice, i.e. that only the