INTRODUCTION: LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

The ideal beginner

It is easy to paint a portrait of the ideal beginning teacher, to conjure up the mix of enthusiasm, thoughtfulness and commitment that characterises an effective learner and nascent colleague – someone with whom you would be happy to share your classes, to observe and advise as they get to grips with the demands of the role.

Such a trainee would arrive not only full of high aspirations for their pupils but also fully aware of how much they, too, had to learn. They would recognise the importance of thorough planning before any lesson and the value of finding out about their pupils' current levels of knowledge and common misconceptions before determining what their objectives should be. While they would seek advice at the planning stage and feedback on their early teaching endeavours, they would also take responsibility for self -evaluation and approach any debriefing with a list of aspects that they had already identified as requiring improvement and even some suggestions about how to make those changes.

While aware of their weaknesses, they would take a realistic view of their own development, recognising where things had genuinely worked well and seeking to build on them. They would welcome constructive criticism, accepting it in the positive spirit in which it was intended, and look for opportunities to take it on board. They would also be alert to the opportunities available to them to learn from their pupils: identifying from the pupils' difficulties where a fuller explanation was needed; paying attention to the pupils' questions and the strategies on which they tended to rely, in order to rethink their own instruction and consider alternative methods.

This may all sound too good to be true, but this particular portrait is not an imaginary one. Although we have given him a pseudonym, Hanif, whom we tracked within a research project through his training year and on into his first two years as a qualified mathematics teacher, displayed all these qualities. He was indeed an outstanding trainee who made tremendous progress. His mentor and other colleagues within the mathematics department thoroughly enjoyed working with him and were always happy to share their ideas, advice and resources with him (as they did with each other). Moreover, the approaches that he had adopted as a trainee continued to inspire his professional learning over the next two years. He always recognised that there was more to learn, insisting that every lesson brought something new. When invited to predict how his first year as a newly qualified teacher (NQT) might compare with his training year, he immediately emphasised his need to go on learning:

Well, for a start the big similarity is that I'll always be learning. Even going beyond an NQT, there is always going to be something else that I can learn. So many million more things that I can learn, in fact.

He was