ABSTRACT
A group of student-teachers had just completed the last week of their first term of a four year programme and they were reviewing their learning at that early stage. With the encouragement of their tutor and classteacher mentor they began to discuss and to identify personal strengths. They then moved on to think about ‘where they wanted to be in four years’ time’ and ‘how they would get there’, anticipating their learning over the rest of the course. In other words they were thinking about the question ‘what is teaching?’ Below are some of their comments to each other.
‘I don’t know what it is that you do, Anna. It’s quite magical. There they were, all fidgeting and restless and ready to be really naughty, and the next thing they were just as good as anything, all ready to listen and looking at you quietly.’
‘Yes, and Richard, my teaching partner in the classroom, he is so really good at explaining things to the children, you could see that they were following and understood.’
‘But isn’t that because he listened to them properly in the first place? You know when we listened to that tape of him questioning the children about his sundial? We said that he made the children feel valued.’
‘Yes but he’d planned it so carefully, too, hadn’t he? But then he nearly spoiled it all with that dreadful writing on the blackboard!!’
