EARLY PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR TEACHERS. Edited by Frank Banks and Ann Shelton-Mayes. David Fulton. pound;18.

AM I TEACHING WELL? By Lisa Hayes, Vesna Nikolic and Hanna Cabaj. Learning Matters. pound;12.99.

EXPERT TEACHING. By Rosie Turner-Bisset. David Fulton. pound;17.

These books are all about defining successful teaching which, depending on your viewpoint, is an art, a gift, a craft or a tick-list of skills. Mark Brundrett and Peter Silcock’s Achieving Competence, Success and Excellence in Teaching is highly theoretical, with references to “process-product paradigms”, “dyadic controls” and “culturation techniques”, none of which are top of my objectives list for 2C.

Of course, we don’t turn to education books for practical guidance alone.

This book gives a series of definitions of the qualities, attitudes and skills we can find in teachers who are competent, successful or excellent. I worked hard at it, but gave up and marked some AS-level homework. It all felt detached from the five schools of my teaching career and the teachers I’ve worked with.

I’m not anti-theory; I’m always quick to draw on educational research. That’s why I’d strongly recommend Frank Banks and Ann Shelton-Mayes’s Early Professional Development for Teachers, a primer and compendium of important thinking for teachers in their formative years. You’ll find Michael Fullan’s blunt but inspirational essay on why change is necessary in schools (“because high proportions of students are alienated, performing poorly or below par or dropping out - and because teachers are frustrated, bored and burnt out”); Howard Gardner’s ground-breaking theory of multiple intelligences; Alistair Smith on accelerated learning. All teachers need this excellent book because it shifts the emphasis from teaching to learning. The training most of us received did not do this. I don’t think I used the word “learning” regularly until around three years ago.

Good teachers have always been reflective, looking for new ideas and ways of sharpening their performance. Am I Teaching Well? is a set of self-evaluation questionnaires to encourage reflection on our classroom practice. There are questions on how we group students, how we ask questions, the classroom layout. This forms a strong starting point for analysis, but I’d have liked more guidance on what to do next. If a questionnaire tells me that I tend to group all my students according to friendship patterns, what should my next step be? I suspect (guiltily) that I’d have welcomed something slightly more didactic. This book would nevertheless make a good manual for ongoing staff development.

Finally, Rosie Turner-Bisset’s Expert Teaching (a confident title) attempts to define the key ingredients of the best teaching at primary level. It’s a neat mixture of research and observed practice, with some interesting narratives documenting real classroom practice to illustrate theory.

Books about the practice of teaching used to be grim reads - too much stodgy sociology and too little classroom relevance. The best of these are a refreshing reminder of the way in which practice is being informed by sound research. We just need a few more written by teachers.

Geoff Barton is headteacher at King Edward VI school, Bury St Edmunds