ABSTRACT
It is commonplace that teachers seldom see one another in action, and discuss their classroom methods and the assumptions underlying them even less frequently. Yet the accounts given by these six experienced teachers have much in common despite their different education, training and career history, and the varying contexts in which they were teaching. There might be several reasons for this, for example, a conscious or unconscious desire to supply me with responses of which they thought I would approve; shared socialization into a common professional culture; similar influences during training which, though in different institutions, took place for five out of the six between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s.
