ABSTRACT
Teachers have always been required to have professional skills, but there can have been few periods in our history when they have needed to display the degree of competence required in the uncertain world of the 1980s. In the nineteenth century training institutions were known as ‘normal schools’, on the grounds that there was some single ‘norm’ endorsed by society. The function of a training establishment was to perpetuate this stereotype, and the Master of Method was employed in the model school to ensure that each new generation of teachers was poured into the same approved mould (Rich, 1933). Today there are several factors which combine to require levels of skill, understanding, imagination and resilience from teachers which go infinitely beyond the rudimentary commonsense and mechanical competence fostered by the normal schools of the last century.
