Becoming a Teacher

Abstract

The empirical literature yields a disturbing conclusion about the experience of learning to teach. Becoming a teacher is complex, stressful, intimate, and largely covert, but in accomplishing this demanding task teachers do not feel helped by teacher education. Wha t laymen, legislators, and education students have been claiming for decades may be true: teacher education is orthogonal to the teacher. In this chapter both the context of learning to teach and the teacher's perceptions of that task will be discussed, as both are important to an understanding of the experience of becoming a teacher. First, the context Will be briefly examined: the peer context and some characteristics of teachers in preparation; the teacher educator context and some characteristics of teachers of teachers; the client context--parents, pupils, and institutional clients of teachers; and the research context. Second, the discussion will turn to the experience of becoming a teacher: early experiences, motivations for entering teaching, developmental tasks and concerns, and processes of change during preservice and early in-service experience. The emphasis will be upon empirical evidence whenever that is available, using as a principal source a review of some three hun-