‘Learning teaching’ in school

Many teachers and trainees will insist that ‘you mostly learn to teach by teaching’. But inspirational teaching is an extremely complex activity that, to the untrained eye of those who have never had to do the job, looks easy (Labaree, 2000). This chapter presents seven workplace learning tools so that you do not end up, having established yourself as a professional teacher, claiming for example to have ‘10 years of classroom experience’ when in fact you merely have ‘1 year of classroom experience, ten times’. The seven workplace learning tools provided here will help you to develop throughout your career by becoming an enquiry-based teacher who continually gains professional learning from classroom and school experiences. These tools are developed from workplace learning theory, but as Kurt Lewin, the inventor of action research, famously claimed (1951), ‘there is nothing so practical as a good theory’. Ironically, if you are to add these tools to your professional toolkit, then you will need to try them out for real, not just read about them. So take your time in reading this chapter, or read it more than once. You need to take ownership of the tools by using them in practical ways to shape your professional learning from classroom and school experiences.