ABSTRACT

One of the ubiquitous pieces of advice offered to geography teachers is that they must evaluate their teaching. Teacher education courses place a strong emphasis on encouraging beginning teachers to evaluate their lessons in order to improve their day-today work. Course assignments encourage them to evaluate the quality of pupils’ learning achieved through units of work, partly because there is a presumed relationship between the quality of learning and the quality of teaching. This is all well and good, and it introduces beginning teachers to what are perhaps the most difficult questions they face:

■ What constitutes progress in learning geography? ■ How does geographical understanding develop-and is this development possible to

measure or judge in a realistic and dependable way? ■ How can assessments of learning feedback and improve teaching?