ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how beginning Japanese teachers structure teaching: the ethnographic descriptions that serve as the basis of analysis. It presents biographical data on the two beginning teachers and illuminates how they became elementary schoolteachers. One is Kenji Yamada at Komori Elementary School, and the other is Yoko Kato at Taika Elementary School. Both Kenji and Yoko learned more through other occasions than through the formal internship program: typically, casual opportunities that produced cumulative effects on beginning teachers. One of the occasions in which they learned considerably about teaching was during their actual teaching process. The chapter investigates how they organized their classroom routines and what they were teaching students. It provides an overview of how they learned to teach. The chapter offers a descriptive account of the routines that beginning teachers developed, followed by an analysis of both their definition of teaching and their mode of learning to teach.
