Learning to see in classrooms: what are student teachers learning about teaching and learning while learning to teach in schools?

Using sociocultural understandings of learning, the authors probe a rationale for training programmes which are extensively school based and involved school-based teacher mentors as supporters of student teachers' learning. They ask what it is that student teachers are learning while in schools and how that learning is supported. Drawing on evidence from a study of 125 student teachers on two training programmes, the authors suggest that student teachers' learning is heavily situated and that students are not acquiring ways of interpreting learners that are easily transferable, but they are learning about curriculum delivery. It also seems that there is a participatory version of training which is not underpinned by an understanding of the implications of learning through participation and which, as a consequence, does not make the most of the strengths of mentors.