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However, there is a great deal to be gained from taking this approach as can be seen from a brief look at some ways in which experienced teachers intuitively approach this. The question of classroom rules is covered in the companion book in this series on Class Management (Wragg 1993). Some teachers give rules to their new pupils, others adopt the idea of negotiating rules with their classes. There is often a debate among teachers as to the extent to which this is ‘genuine negotiation’ and to what extent it is a subtle way of imposing rules on children.

A student teacher who pursued the idea of ‘maintaining interest’ through the use of negotiated rules came up with an unusual approach. She made her set of rules, which were displayed in the classroom, the centre of continuing interest by asking pairs of children in turn, throughout the term, to collect and report examples of the rules being observed by the class. She made time to discuss the report with the authors before it became public and removed the specific instances of misbehaviour (there was a tendency at first to want to report wrong-doers), so that children could concentrate on the general matter of rule observation.

This term is used to summarise the complex process in which teachers are involved when they provide an example of teaching. We begin by showing in diagrammatic form how an example of teaching is related to the teacher’s overall instructional design. 1 that we are suggesting that any example of teaching, the central, observable part of classroom life, is based on six elements. Each of these is described below. An understanding of how children learn There is no clearly defined set of readings that constitutes the psychology curriculum for the initial or further training of teachers, so different people have substantially different backgrounds in their knowledge about how children learn.