ABSTRACT
The thousands of repeats and rehearsals of favoured teaching styles experienced by teachers over a professional lifetime make for a static rather than dynamic practitioner. It would be easy to acquire a set of strategies that appear to fi t cosily, like a favourite pair of slippers, but the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries requires something much more fl exible and imaginative. Alexander et al. (1992), in a report on primary teaching commissioned by the Secretary of State, were among many who commended careful scrutiny of classroom processes by the practitioners themselves.
