Learning to teach

Abstract

Much has been written about learning to teach. Researchers and scholars have examined teachers' learning-changes in what they know, what they believe, how they think, how they act, and how they think of themselves as professionals and people-from a variety of perspectives (e.g., Carter, 1990; Feiman-Nemser, 1983; Richardson, 1990). The greatest challenge we faced in writing this chapter was deciding what to include and what to omit. Which of the many perspectives on learning to teach are reasonably thought of as psychological? Of those perspectives that are psychological, which are most in keeping with this Handbook's focus-as described in Chapter I-on cognition as the prevailing theoretical framework in contemporary educational psychology and on the renewed engagement of educational psychology in issues of practice? To answer these questions for ourselves, and decide what to include in the chapter, we took cognitive psychology as our starting point.