CP 92-1 Learning to teach in a different culture.
Abstract
This paper is a personal account of learning to teach. Though the author has conducted research in education for several years, she had very little formal teaching experiences prior to this account. Nevertheless, like many novices, she had formed a number of ideas about teaching and learning that influenced her ability to teach and her ability to learn more about teaching. In this case, the occasion for learning to teach was not a new teaching position in the United States, but instead a consulting visit to another country which entailed a combination of lectures, workshops, and consultation meetings. The paper describes the author's difficulties both in learning about this new audience and in learning how to present ideas to an audience. Though the experiences she describes are unusual, because they are cross-national, many features apply to all novice teachers, regardless of when and where they learn to teach.