ABSTRACT
When you were interviewed for your place on your initial teacher training course you may have been asked why you wanted to teach. Your answer probably included reference to liking children and gaining pleasure from helping them to learn. By now you will know that nothing in education is so simple. If all that was needed to be a teacher was to like children and have pleasure in helping them, most people could teach. As Pollard (1997) explains, teaching is:
… a complex and highly skilled activity which, above all, requires classroom teachers to exercise judgement in deciding how to act.
(p. 4)