Thinking Like a Teacher

Preparing New Teachers for Today's Classrooms

Edited by Jo-Anne Kerr, Linda Norris

Publication date:

07 August 2017

Length of book:

204 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475833720

Today’s classrooms present a variety of challenges for teachers, many of which result from unanticipated, unpredictable events, from minor to serious. This collection of teacher narratives highlights several of these challenges with subsequent reflections and commentaries that invite conversations about aspects of teaching that often remain unacknowledged in educator preparation programs but that can have deleterious effects on the implementation of the pedagogical content knowledge that is promoted in these programs. Thinking Like a Teacher: Preparing New Teachersfor Today’s Classrooms aims to address this gap in educator preparation programs through sharing and affirming teachers’ voices as sources of pedagogical knowledge. Engagement with the narratives included in this collection will help teacher candidates perceive and think about teaching in new ways as they make the transition from instructional consumers to instructional leaders while simultaneously forging a new professional identity.

Dedication
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Foreword—Janet Alsup
Introduction—Linda Norris and Jo-Anne Kerr
Preface—Sara Kirkpatrick Rhodes

Section I
Chapter 1: Of Early Dismissals and Observations—Ian Cunningham
Chapter 2: One Size Never Fits All: Teaching the Same Lesson with Differing Outcomes—Samantha DiMauro
Chapter 3: The Best-Laid Plans?—Emily DuPlessis
Chapter 4: The Fault of Technology: When the Projector Dies—Alexander Hagood

Section II
Chapter 5: Creating an Atmosphere of Respect and Rapport—Scott Gibbons
Chapter 6: Many Things to Many People: Life as a New Teacher—Heather Lowry

Section III
Chapter 7: A Horse to Water—Shane Conrad
Chapter 8: A Tumultuous First Year—Richard Courtot
Chapter 9: Teaching to an Empty Desk—Edward Litzinger
Chapter 10: An Unexpected Teachable Moment—Michael Tosti

Section IV
Chapter 11: Teacher-Parent—Tara Brodish
Chapter 12: Lessons that “Stick”—Nicole Frankenfield
Chapter 13: Teaching a Student with Depression—Patrick Gahagan
Chapter 14: The Pang of Terror—Janel Prinkey
Chapter 15: Defending and Protecting My Students—Caroline Lehman
Afterword—Sara Kirkpatrick Rhodes, Linda Norris, Jo-Anne Kerr
Appendices A and B
References
About the Contributors
Index

This engaging collection of beginning English teachers’ narratives portraying how they coped with the particular challenges of implementing instructional plans in their classrooms addresses a major challenge facing teacher educators—how to help pre-service and novice teachers adapt and alter their teaching ideas according to the particularities of their own unique classrooms and students. In these narratives, new teachers add descriptions on their adaption processes as well as respond to Kerr and Norris’s useful questions and prompts that serve to model ways of reflecting on how to cope with these challenges. In responding to these narratives, pre-service and novice teachers can then compare their own challenges to those portrayed in these narratives, leading to development of self-reflection practices and pedagogical content knowledge. This book therefore serves to foster what Norris describes as ‘situational pedagogy’ essential for pre-service and novice teachers achieving success in the classroom.