ABSTRACT
The Learning How to Learn project sought to understand how teachers and their students could develop ‘learning how to learn’ practices (James et al. 2007). This was set in a world where ‘knowledge economies’ require lifelong learning and the need to respond to social and economic change. For those in schools, it asks that they focus students’ attention on their learning, and hence the popular term ‘learning to learn’. For teachers and those who support them, this orientation requires a new focus on their pedagogy. They too have to learn. But in the Learning How to Learn (LHTL) project we went one step further and wanted them too ‘to learn how to learn’. This was not a research project taking a passive view of its subjects, but had an agenda both to change practice and to investigate the issues that this raised. Any such undertaking brings with it a legacy of attempts to deal with teacher learning, on both intellectual and policy fronts. In this chapter we will attempt to explore these contextual factors.
