ABSTRACT
Education, it might be argued, is about the achievement of understanding and a concern to foster 'open minds' rather than minds that are 'closed'. Classrooms are busy places and, by their nature, make impossible demands upon both the children and teachers within them. As B. Goacher et al showed, 'special educational needs'; is a relative term and dependent upon so many variables that, in effect, it becomes fairly meaningless in generic usage. N. Bennett et al shows that even in classrooms which teachers would describe as 'child-centred' the actual experience for the children was likely to be teacher dominated and in essence, traditional. Metaphors act to structure people understanding of a concept and its related activities. Perhaps, as a final thought, one further dimension of the metaphor deserves to be made explicit. Perspectives are the key to understanding teacher development.
