I received a copy of a journal today, and I just want to check something. The article is about science education research, and in it the person talks about teacher training(this is in a journal about science education) and suggests that those people on teacher training courses should be taking some modules at M level- fair enough - but the implication is that they should be doing research into science education whilst they are still learning the 'how to teach' bit. Now my query is, can they do this? do you need a basic knowledge about a subject before you can make innovations, I'm assuming that they intend to do some kind of action research which appears popular in this area at the moment, so how could you do this without having a solid grounding in current teaching in the area, you might just be 'reinventing the wheel' Any comments would be welcome because I think I may be arguing that this is going to cause a lot of problems in all subjects, but especially science.

Luckily the people here on the scheme are not doing this, otherwise the guy who came to ask if, as the pupils had seen the action of sodium with water, he could have some acid as he wanted them to see the action with that (not a chance wasn't my exact phrase, but amounted to the same thing)might have decided to do it without asking on the princple he was researching how to extend their knowledge

joyce, i think there are two issues here. one is: can these people produce decent m-level research? and the other is: will this attempt at doing research make them better teachers (or make their learning experience more interesting)?
as to the first, i would say it's not impossible but would depend on many factors and as such could not be expected; because, as you say, normally before we do research or something, to find out something new, we study what is known already first.
as to the second, well, what better way to learn about the strength and weaknesses of different teaching methods than by trying them out, experimenting with them? if someone tells me: you've got to teach like THIS. i can learn that by rote, but i won't really have understood it. but if i try to improve that (and perhaps spectacularly fail) then i will have truly understood why this is how it is done!