ABSTRACT
Managing the very first encounters with a new class is an important aspect of teaching, but sustaining and enhancing rules, relationships, application to the task in hand, preparation and planning must go on throughout the time that teachers and pupils are together. In order to monitor what happened in these more mature phases of the school year or term, once daily routines had been established, we decided to study the classrooms of a sample of experienced and novice teachers in different kinds of schools. Schools in ten local authorities were approached as being representative of a variety of large and small urban and rural schools. Thirty schools agreed to participate, and between one and nine teachers were observed in each school, giving a total of sixty teachers and students, of whom fifty-one were female and nine were male. Each was observed for four sessions, except for one teacher who was ill for several weeks and so was only observed for three sessions. The distribution of teachers and lessons is shown in table 4.1. This chapter concentrates on the quantitative data from these observations. The qualitative data are reported in chapter 5.
