ABSTRACT
When the intending teacher arrives in a college or department of education, he brings with him a rich store of memories about the men and women who have taught him during his childhood and adolescence. Among them will be, very probably, idealized portraits of ‘good’ teachers and caricature-like portraits of ‘bad’ teachers. When he begins to teach, his first concern will be to convince himself that he has a sort of working competence in the classroom—that he is more like the idealized portraits than the caricatures. But before long he will find that ‘being a good teacher’ is not a question of ‘being like Mr X’, but rather a question of finding ways of taking the teacher’s role without ceasing to be himself. And this will force upon him the necessity of examining his own feelings and thoughts about what kind of relationship he wants to have with his classes and what sort of assumptions about the nature of leadership and authority he is prepared to accept and live with.
