Images of teaching: Student teachers' early conceptions of classroom practice

Abstract

Twelve student primary teachers were followed through the first year of a B.Ed. course at a college of education in England to identify, using a variety of methods, the understandings of teaching, learning, and the curriculum that they held on entry to teacher training, and how these understandings related to their reactions to the course and to the interpretations they made of their own and others' practice. Students were found to hold particular images of teaching, mostly derived from their experiences in schools as pupils, which were sometimes highly influential in their interpretation of the course and of classroom practice. Several issues are raised and discussed about the nature of teachers' knowledge, and means of facilitating its growth in a training context.