Learning to Teach

The Leverhulme Primary Project reported here provides for the first time evidence on what is actually happening in teacher education today and on how novice teachers learn their craft. The book looks in detail at the experience of all the student teachers on one post graduate primary teacher training course and of those responsible for them in their university and in schools. It tracks them as they work to acquire the appropriate subject and pedagogical knowledge and as their own beliefs about teaching develop during the course. A final section follows some of the students through their fist year as qualified teachers. Teacher education is going through a peiod of radical change and more peole than ever before now have some responsibility, whether in higher education or in school for the training of teachers. None of them can afford to ignore the fresh insights into how teachers are made contained in this book.

Neville Bennett is Professor of Primary Education at the University of Exeter and co-director of the Leverhulme Primary Project. His publications include Teaching Styles and Pupil Progress (1976), The Quality of Pupil Learning Experiences (with Charles Desforges, Anne Cockburn and Betty Wilkinson, 1984), A Good Start? Four Year Olds in Infant School (with Joy Kell, 1989) and Talking and Learning in Groups (with Elisabeth Dunne; Routledge, 1990), part of the Leverhulme Primary Project Classroom Skills series of notebooks. Clive Carré is coordinator of the Leverhulme Primary Project and editor of the Leverhulme Primary Project Classroom Skills series. His publications include Language Teaching and Learning in Science (1981) and Visual Communication in Science: Learning through Sharing Images (with D. Barlex, 1985).