Teachers telling teachers: exploring students' memories for teacher education

In the literature on teacher training, the use of students’ personal narratives is viewed as a learningtool and a research method, that can be used to reflect and understand how complex is the teachingand learning process. With the aim to explore student teachers’ memories and their influence on theirideas about teaching, a sample of 112 future teachers were asked to narrate their past experiences asstudents and reflect on them. The data collected show the profile of a teacher offering mostly creativeand collaborative educational activities, able to listen to and support her/his students both from aneducational and emotional point of view. The paper points out that an effective teacher is able to usethe appropriate teaching strategies, to manage the class group and to provide each student with theadequate support and her/his socio-emotional skills.