ABSTRACT
The essential problem for most students going out on teaching practice is that they already know too much to be able to observe. Observation demands a certain naïveté, an ability to create the unexpected and unusual out of the commonplace and mundane. For many students the life of classrooms is only too familiar, and it is not the events of the classroom that are problematic but their own identity in relation to those events. The successes and crises are not seen as mere incidents but as personal achievements. The experience is often an experience of self.
