International trends in initial teacher education (ITE) and induction increasingly emphasise the importance of school-based learning for beginning teachers, and recent policy shifts have given many more schools a leading role in ITE. This book focuses directly on what has been learned from within well-established partnerships about the nature of beginning teachers' learning in schools and explores the ways in which teacher educators - both those that are school-based and those in universities who work in partnership with them - can most effectively support that learning.

Beginning Teaching is part of the successful Critical Guides for Teacher Educators series edited by Ian Menter.


This book supports all those involved in initial teacher education (ITE) and with an interest in partnership working. Such partnerships are at the heart of ITE practices, both in the UK and internationally, but more recently models of partnership have become ever more complex as a result of government reforms, the rapid diversification of routes into teaching and significant increase in the number of SCITTs. The nature of partnerships in ITE remains contested with partnership working often reduced to a series of prescriptions for effective practice, ignoring both its pedagogic potential and inherent tensions. This book surveys and critiques partnership developments in recent years and then analyses a single case study of a school that exemplifies the current complexity of ITE partnerships using both policy and practice perspectives. It concludes with a series of principles that might underpin effective partnership working.