To Be A Teacher in The Right Sense Is To Be A Learner. I'm Not A Teacher, Only A Fellow Student.'

To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Im not a teacher, only a fellow student.
Soren Kierkegaard1
CHAPTER I
Introduction
This chapter guides the reader through the organization of the thesis, with the aim of providing a better understanding of the way information is presented. First, it offers a brief rationale for the research study and the chapters of the thesis. Then, it explains the terminology employed further in the thesis, defining terms such as teacher training, teacher development and teacher education. The last part of this chapter refers to the particularities of the Romanian education context of the research, set within rapidly changing times and reforms. It explains that failure in implementing reforms in education is due to a lack of informed change agenda.
1.0.
Introduction to the research study. A personal account.
Being a teacher is not something that I always knew I would like to do. Becoming a teacher is an ongoing journey with many twists and turns that will never cease, and this is the beauty of it. As
19th century Danish philosopher and theologian, father of Existentialism (1813-1855). Quote from Letter to Hans Peter, Kierkegaard's cousin (1848). http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Soren_Kierkegaard
Coelho2s Shepard in search of his treasure, I have discovered things along the way that I would have never seen had I not entered the path of this journey.
There is only one way to learn [] Its through action. Everything you need to know you have learned through your journey. (Coelho, 1993: 132)
And I have learned a lot of new things. Some of them were things that I had already experienced, but they were not really new, but that I never perceived before because I was accustomed to them.
Youve got to find your treasure, so that everything you have learned along the way can make sense. (Coelho, 1993:122)
I discovered my passion for teaching and every day in the process of learning to teach meant a new discovery about myself as a person and as a professional. This research study represents a moment in my journey when I decided to stop, to look back in order to find my way forward. Until that moment, I had been a student teacher, who became a qualified teacher. Then in order to understand better what I was doing in the classroom, I started researching my own teaching and the learning environment in search of improvement. The enquiry expanded and included fellow teachers who shared their experiences. I consider it a preliminary research which gave me some insight into the needs of novice teachers when they started teaching and the implications for their preparation. This brings us to the present moment when the research study represents an attempt to understand teacher development within initial teacher education and the role that reflection plays in the process of learning to teach. I have chosen to refer to these issues as reflections on my own development as a teacher and as a researcher. Reflections on my peers
2
Paulo Coelho (1993) The Alchemist, London: Harper Collins Publishers.
views of their professional development helped me identify and problematize common emerging issues in learning to teach. The interest in reflection is justified by the belief that fellow teachers and myself have learned from our own experiences, by making sense of the processes we were going through individually and interacting with each other, by means of reflection. For these reasons I chose to investigate an initial teacher education programme in my own context, namely in Bucharest, Romania.
This study presents the phenomenon through the eyes of the people involved in the educational process. From this perspective, interpreting the world is subjective. Since knowledge is individually constructed, then understanding teacher development would be appropriate through the eyes of the meaning-makers, the people involved in the development process. Therefore, the subjects of this investigation are trainees, trainers and co-trainers in this programme. The focus is on their views of the training, the concept of reflection, whether or not the training fostered/promoted reflection by means of different methods/activities/processes, and the ways they regard these processes in relation to their understanding of professional development. I need to mention that the enquiry into means of promoting reflection within the programme, originates from wanting to know more about implications that learning through self analysis have for teacher education. In other words, as Pollard (2002) believes, if reflection is fundamental to teacher learning, TE programmes should foster/promote reflection by using a series of methods/activities/processes in practice.

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To be a teacher in the right sense is to be a learner. Im not a teacher, only a fellow student.

Introduction to the research study. A personal account.

Paulo Coelho (1993) The Alchemist, London: Harper Collins Publishers.

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