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The other members of the group sometimes had different ideas to mine and by discussing I managed to get some subjects clearer in my mind. Although this meant that we had to do most of our written work at home I think I gained quite a lot from these discussions. My ideas on education, for example, have changed. I think that the most important part of the course for me was when we went out of school to interview people. We had to go up to people we had never seen before and talk to them. I think that these interviews showed me how nice it was to communicate with people although I found it quite difficult to ask the right questions and keep the conversation going.

The significance of methodology Perhaps the single most important development in educational thinking within the past decade has been the elevation of the status of methodology within the learning process. Good primary school practice has for years been based upon the premiss that children learn most effectively by 'doing', but the full implications of the truism have not been clearly articulated until very recently even in relation to primary education, while secondary school practice still continues to function as though methodology were a form of pillsugaring, a way of making palatable what is really being learned, the subject content itself.

Likeable, but scarcely hard-working, he suddenly realised that his immed~ate future lay in his own hands. He wanted a high-grade CSE pass and worked unstintingly in the final part of the course to achieve it, writing essays with skill, commitment and alacrity in order to justify his own grading. In retrospect it is difficult to imagine any teaching device or method which could have produced so startling and instant an effect. The vast majority of pupils reacted less spectacularly but nevertheless seriously and responsibly.