Nothing changes, everything changes
I once had a group of teacher education students in the middle nineties in the School of Education at Anglia Polytechnic University. This was a typical group of trainee primary teachers - half 18-year-old women, half mature women and one man. I was introducing simulation programs and began with a Granny's Garden - I played the tune from the program and asked the group could they identify it and had they seen it in use in the classroom on school experience visits. Two 18-year-olds piped up "Yes - its Granny's Garden - we've used it". I asked "What were the children doing with it?" They said "We were those children!"
Lessons learnt
The lesson for me was, time moves faster than you think, and raises the question of whether they were better able as a generation of teachers to make sense of present and future opportunities than the generation of teachers which preceded them? Should professional development for teachers now be quite different from the past and assume a different level of familiarity?
