Curriculum aims often remain unrealised aspirations. This is because the values
and principles implicit in them fail to get articulated in forms that can effectively
inform and guide the practice of teaching. Ideas such as ‘learner-centred education’,
‘independent/autonomous learning’, ‘self-directed learning’, ‘enquiry/discovery
learning’, ‘collaborative learning’, ‘active learning’ and ‘learning with
understanding’ refer to critical aspects of the learning process rather than its
outcomes. While often enthusiastically embraced by teachers, they rarely get realised
in appropriate forms of virtuous action. Such is the power of an outcomesbased
model of teaching and learning to shape the practice of teaching. This
paper cites examples of curriculum design that specify the pedagogical values
and principles implicit in various educational aims, and shows how they can provide
a basis for practical experiments by teachers in their classrooms and
schools, in a quest to transform their teaching into concrete forms of virtuous
action. Indeed, the paper depicts a number of actual action research projects in
which teachers generated some common insights into how to transform their
teaching into the practice of virtue in education. It also explores the role of theory-
informed action research in developing teaching as a virtuous form of
action.