Theories of Professional Learning

International trends in initial teacher education (ITE) and induction increasingly emphasise the importance of school-based learning for beginning teachers, and recent policy shifts have given many more schools a leading role in ITE. This book focuses directly on what has been learned from within well-established partnerships about the nature of beginning teachers' learning in schools and explores the ways in which teacher educators - both those that are school-based and those in universities who work in partnership with them - can most effectively support that learning.

Beginning Teaching is part of the successful Critical Guides for Teacher Educators series edited by Ian Menter.

Ian Menter (AcSS) is Professor of Teacher Education and Director of Professional Programmes in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. He previously worked at the Universities of Glasgow, the West of Scotland, London Metropolitan, the West of England and Gloucestershire. Before that he was a primary school teacher in Bristol, England. His most recent publications include A Literature Review on Teacher Education for the 21st Century (Scottish Government) and A Guide to Practitioner Research in Education(Sage). His work has also been published in many academic journals.

Katharine Burnis a university lecturer in education at the University of Oxford where she leads the PGCE history programme. She taught history for 10 years in school and became fascinated by the process of professional learning, first as a mentor of beginning teachers and then as a head of department desperately trying to keep more senior colleagues focused on developing their classroom practice. After completing a doctorate studying history teachers' learning in school and university, she became research officer for the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers (DEBT) project, a longitudinal study of 24 beginning teachers that traced their development over the course of their initial training and through the first two years of their career.

Hazel Haggerwas co-director of the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers (DEBT) project. She taught English for many years before joining the University of Oxford in order to contribute to the development of one of the earliest ITE partnerships, and went on to become PGCE course director. Her doctoral research focused on ways of making practising teachers' expertise accessible to beginners and she has written extensively on teachers' learning and development.

Trevor Mutton is the current PGCE course director at the University of Oxford, where he also contributes to the Master's programme in Learning and Teaching. He taught Modern Foreign Languages before joining the university and has since been involved in a range of research into language teaching and into the nature of beginning teachers' learning (including the Developing Expertise of Beginning Teachers (DEBT) project).