ABSTRACT
When you reach the end of your period of induction you will be looking forward to moving on into your early professional development activities. At this stage more than ever becoming research literate is helpful to your development as a teacher, because you can design your teaching and develop your own practice based on previous studies in your field, or on an area of teaching and learning. Your own work then builds on a sound basis of previous work. Research in the context of teaching can be defined in several ways, for example teachers use particular research skills when they work on curriculum development, prepare lessons, resources, schemes of work. Schools are research-rich institutions. Teachers are full-time researchers in one sense, but might not realise this. The process of checking the quality and effectiveness of your teaching requires hypothesising, collecting data, assessing the hypothesis against the data, evaluating, then applying the findings to your teaching. We could so describe the cycle of lesson planning, delivery and evaluation, or writing a scheme of work and evaluating it. In Learning to Teach in the Secondary School, 3rd edition, observation schedules and paired observation techniques, work on lesson planning, keeping a reflective journal and evaluating lessons are described as helpful techniques for beginning teachers to use in examining their classroom practice (see particularly Chapters 2.2 and 5.4).
