Learning to Teach

Teacher education is currently the subject of widespread political debate and radical reform. There is, however, very little recent empirical evidence about what actually happens on teacher training courses and in the first year of teaching. The Leverhulme Primary Project, reported here, looks in detail at the experience of all the student teachers on one post graduate primary teacher training course and of those responsible for them in their university and in school. It tracks them as they work to acquire the appropriate subject and pedagogical knowledge and as their own attitudes and beliefs about teaching develop through the course. A final section follows some of the students through their first year as qualified teachers. The aim throughout the book is to define the basic teaching competences and to show how these relate to the knowledge bases with which novice teachers enter the profession. More people than ever before now have some responsibility, whether in higher education or in schools, for the training of teachers and the insights into how teachers are made contained in this book are designed to help them.