ABSTRACT
The research on teachers’ styles of teaching is abundant if not always subtle. Long before school effectiveness research became so prominent there were constant attempts to discover and disseminate information about those precise actions that will have the most immediate impact on pupils. At certain levels this managerial approach to successful teaching can be quite crude. Distinctions between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’, or between the ‘inductive’ and ‘traditional’ approaches, between whole class teaching and group work, make teachers sound like mechanics learning a trade. Whether in the imposition of the instructions about ‘literacy hours’ or in the formulation of how to teach presented by the government through the ‘three wise men’ (Alexander, Rose and Woodhead, 1992), there are many assumptions made about teaching based on the essential belief that what is taught is what is learnt, or that what is learnt depends on the success and efficiency or the teacher’s style of delivery. This makes teachers seem as if they were without different personalities, as if pupils did not react differently according to their personal characteristics. Exploring pupils’ perceptions of teachers demonstrates that there are some essential ground rules that are successful, but these are rather different from and more subtle than distinctions between, say, ostensibly ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ approaches.
