Discovering the Hidden Realities of Teaching and Learning in the Classroom
Emeritus Professor Graham Nuthall
Talk given at the launch of The Graham Nuthall Classroom Research Trust, University of Canterbury, 5 May 2004
I would like to give a brief overview of the some of the things I have discovered about teaching and learning over nearly 45 years of research, carried out, on and off, as other duties permitted. I usually think of it as 40 years, but Jill says it is 45 years, and she should know because in my first research study, I borrowed her bike with the cane basket on the front to carry the heavy Phillips tape-recorder and all the wires and bits of string that I needed to record in the classrooms of long-suffering teachers.
One of the most important things about school classrooms is that they are both very familiar and at the same time very mysterious.
Because all of us have spent at least 10 years as pupils in school classrooms we are thoroughly familiar with what happens there. There seems to be nothing mysterious about teaching. We can all do it, maybe not well, but we know what to do.