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This paper suggests that the conception of teacher thinking must be expanded beyond planning and decision making. People's ordinary conception of thinking includes imagining and remembering, judging and interpreting, as well as aspects of caring and feeling. To understand the scope and meaning of teachers ' thought researchers mlit broaden and diversify their ideas and also reconsider the assumed links of teacher thinking to action and utility. The paper analyzes the concept and activity of contemplation as one crucial process of teacher thinking that directs and supports the comprehensive practical life. Defining contemplation as careful attention and wonderstruck beholding, it examines subject wetter and children as primary objects of teachers ' contemplative concern. An argument is made for the practicality of contemplation by developing a concept of practice that goes beyond what an individual teache