ABSTRACT
It is an unfortunate fact that most courses of inservice education and training for experienced teachers parallel those for beginning teachers in their neglect of the study of teaching or pedagogy. Courses abound at masters level in educational studies in various fields such as philosophy, psychology or history of education. There are also courses in a variety of ‘main subject’ studies, carefully labelled in the style: ‘mathematics education’ or ‘English education’ or ‘chemical education’; not, note, ‘English teaching’ or ‘maths teaching’. Often educationists outside the training institutions see these courses as academic and hardly relevant to the real world of the classroom. I found this attitude quite prevalent among chief education officers when, as director of an institute of education in a university, I talked to them about courses of inservice training run by the institute. In times of restricted resources these administrators preferred diploma courses in subjects such as remedial education or teaching reading which they saw as ‘practical’ and likely to have a useful pay-off in terms of actual teaching expertise.
