24
Induction of newly-qualified teachers
6.28
One of the major frustrations of teacher education is that
many students who have successfully absorbed the creative teaching
techniques on which their training is based and have shown considerable
potential for further development are ultimately unable to resist a
pervasive pressure which exists in some schools to teach in a mechanical,
unimaginative style. They may wish for example, to try out a new activity
(it may simply be, say, a regrouping of pupils in the classroom to facilitate
class discussion) and find that the school authorities forbid it because
of the disturbance it is alleged to cause, or they may find that the school
judges their performance by the efficiency with which they can take a
class through several chapters of a textbook on which it is planned to
set an examination (testing, typically, little more than factual recall).
Newly-qualified teachers are all too rarely given the support they require
by senior staff, and are expected to conform to the norms of the school
and to adopt its prevailing attitudes to work, however much these may
be at variance with the techniques and attitudes they have absorbed
through their training.
some years ago: a change of attitude is being brought about slowly as new
ideas are accepted into the system (the increasing adoption of the 'learning
by doing' approach by primary schools is a case in point) but teaching
styles in some schools are uncreative, and many schools are unreceptive
to new ideas.
6.29
This is perhaps less of a problem than it was
Critics may well say that the situation described above is the
inevitable consequence of large classes, selection and examination
pressures, poor teacher/class ratios, inferior resource materials, etc.,
and to some extent this argument would have to be accepted. However,
there is also a lack of effective professional management within schools
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