ABSTRACT
It is important to remember that when pupils speak about the teaching they have experienced, they do so in terms of their own experiences, including their own learning. Like any participants or observers in classrooms, pupils observe teaching selectively from a particular perspective, and in their case it is the perspective of those who are taught. The insights that we can therefore expect from them are about the learning opportunities available to them in the classroom situations that they experience, about how helpful they judge these opportunities to be, and about how their opportunities for learning in these classrooms might be improved. We cannot expect pupils to talk about teaching as a professional craft to be understood in all its complexity, nor have we found them doing so. Sometimes, however, they do try to take the teacher’s perspective, thinking about what it is possible for teachers to do and what is not. Similarly, they sometimes recognise that other pupils have points of view that are different from their own.
