ABSTRACT
One of the difficulties of teaching practice is being observed. In a sense, as any new teacher is, students are scrutinized by the children, but they also have to learn to tolerate observation by other teachers, perhaps the head or head of department, college tutors and even external examiners. In many colleges this difficulty is further compounded by the fact that many of these observers are present with evaluative functions-trying to fit you into a category of comparative merit. (A process incidentally that is indefensible bureaucratically and educationally and runs counter to sixty years of the findings of research.) In this book we have assumed that the use of observation-as a means of making judgements of merit-is hardly defensible; when that merit is essentially comparative we think it is impossible to defend.
