ABSTRACT

The supervision of student teachers is a much understudied subject in Britain. This may be because teaching itself has, until recent years, received little attention from researchers in education. Preoccupations such as the study of individual and group differences may well have deflected attention from the study of how to help people to learn (Stones 1978a). The recent upsurge of interest in classroom studies, however, is not showing much evidence of being influenced by, or making a contribution to, theories relating to human learning or teaching. Given this context it is perhaps not surprising that many teacher educators still implement methods of supervision that have been characterized as atheoretical, idiosyncratic, poorly conceptualized, of doubtful efficacy and in some cases probably harmful (MacAleese 1976, Greenfield 1977, Stones and Morris 1972b).