ABSTRACT
The educational context with which teachers are most immediately concerned is that of the classroom. The major part of this chapter will deal with the classroom context, but the wider contexts of school, community and society will also be considered. Knowledge of contexts is vital for expert teaching, but as with other knowledge for teaching, it is linked to other knowledge bases, in particular, knowledge of self. How one functions within a classroom and school context is inevitably bound up with one’s self-image as a teacher. At the same time, the prevailing orthodoxy of how a school or local authority organises classrooms can promote tensions between personal and public beliefs about how learning should be managed. Varieties of classroom context are also connected to methods of classroom organisation and management: the layout of furniture and work areas can have an impact on the kinds of teaching and learning which go on in classrooms. The following discussion presents issues and dilemmas of classroom contexts and organisation of which expert teachers need to be aware, in order to make informed judgements about the creation and management of contexts which promote learning. Classrooms are complex environments and expert teachers are able to ‘read’ them with an informed understanding of the forces which have shaped them, as well as the awareness or ‘withitness’ described by Kounin (1970).
