ABSTRACT
When you were first interviewed for your place on the initial teacher training course you have been following, you were probably asked, among other things, why you wanted to teach. Your answer probably included reference to liking children, enjoying their company and gaining pleasure from helping them to learn. By now, you should realise that nothing in education is that simple. If all that was needed to be a teacher was the liking of children and pleasure gained from being with them and helping them, anyone could do it. You now know that there is much more to it than that. As Pollard (1997) explains, teaching is ‘. . . a complex and highly skilled activity which, above all, requires classroom teachers to exercise judgement in deciding how to act’ (1997: 4).
