Abstract
Learning to teach ought to be a major province of inservice rather than of preservice teacher education. A "learning to teach continuum" consists of four phases in a teacher's development. During the pretraining phase, which begins with the first childhood exposure to school, patterns and ideas of teaching are formed, and a model of teaching is internalized. In this way, before starting their formal pedagogical work, teachers have already had considerable informal preparation for teaching. The preservice phase of a teacher's development exposes teachers to the knowledge base of the profession in a systematic way. There is a general impression that teachers think their education courses are too theoretical and not sufficiently practical and that the most valuable part of teacher education is student teaching. Student teaching may, however, foster too narrow a vision of teaching. It is during the first years of actual teaching, or the induction phase of learning to teach, that the teacher's view of teaching broadens from learning to teach to learning from teaching. The problems faced by beginning teachers should alert them to their needs and provide a basis for future problem solving strategies. The inservice phase of learning spans the rest of the teacher's career, where helping teachers to become motivated to improve their own performance and expand their own learning is a legitimate inservice priority. The teacher center concept is vital for inservice education, since it provides professional interactions with peers. (JD)