ABSTRACT
The nature and quality of teacher education is the subject of much concern in many countries around the world. Confidence has been lost, it would appear, in the ability of current courses to provide teachers with the appropriate knowledge and skills for highquality teaching. In Britain, for example, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate has constantly criticized teacher training institutions for failing to provide adequate study of subject knowledge, and for curriculum courses which fail to cover such crucial professional skills as planning, assessment, and differentiation. Teachers with inadequate levels of knowledge, they argue, do not understand the progressive development of pupils’ knowledge, skills and attitudes, and lack the detailed and rigorous conceptual framework needed to examine the purposes, methods and uses of assessment. In surveys of beginning teachers they claim that these same weaknesses persist.
