Abstract

As a dimension of beginning teachers’ identities roles and ways of working form an important factor. Teachers’ professionalism is a multidimensional and dynamic phenomenon. Individual differences might be notable due to, for example, interpretation and transposition of curriculum contents, adaptation of teaching objectives, organization of time, of space and working material, and the composition of the learning groups. Also the didactic contract has influence on individual differences as well as the relationship between teacher and pupils, the relationship between pupils, the class dynamics, the learning climate, and the teacher’s representation of the knowledge she has to teach and the methods that could be used. Altogether six pre- and in-service primary teachers took part in an investigation of their individual features as emerging in teaching of sciences. The teachers wrote an essay over the themes curriculum, teamwork, integration, concreteness, and their own teacherhood. At a second stage they had to choose one picture out of twelve that they thought well corresponded to an instructional situation from a science lesson. They should also give a short comment on why they had chosen the picture in question. Only three pictures were chosen. These pictures and the essays made it possible to allocate the teachers to three different teacher types. One of these is mainly performance oriented; the other two are mainly representing a humanistic-constructivist pedagogy. However, all three categories are strongly overlapping.