ABSTRACT
When planning teacher training courses it is useful to know what new teachers have to do when they begin their professional career. Teaching is probably the one job that the majority of people would claim to know most about. Rather ironically, when the practitioners have been asked to describe their work, accurate information has been considerably harder to achieve. The Clegg Commission, which looked at teachers' salaries in 1981, encountered so much difficulty in obtaining usable job descriptions that it abandoned the attempt altogether. At the individual level, formal job descriptions are so rare as to be exceptional. Where efforts have been made to identify the nature of teaching, the focus has tended to be selective, concentrating on the teacher-pupil interaction, or on the duties of key personnel (headteachers, heads of department, pastoral tutors especially). No-one would want to diminish the value of such studies, but to assume their full value it is essential that it should be possible to place them in context. Only one broad-based British study of the complete teaching span is currently available (Hilsum and Strong, 1978), and even that has its inevitable limitations. Clearly, there is ample scope for further study of the content of secondary school teaching. Furthermore, it would be very useful if such a study could provide a context within which some of the more selective investigations could be interpreted. In these circumstances a particularly productive line of development consists of establishing a methodology which can then be used to extend available information. The remainder of this chapter outlines a project to design a self-report job description instrument; it then proceeds to describe some of the findings arising from applications of the instrument, especially in as far as these findings elucidate the nature of the new teacher's job.
