Proactive Images for Pre-Service Teachers: Identity, Expectations, and Avoiding Practice Shock

Description

This book provides tools to help pre-service teachers and teacher-preparation programs identify, evaluate, and respond to misaligned expectations early in the teacher-preparation sequence. Plato tells the story of prisoners who mistake the shadows on the wall of their cave for flesh-and-blood reality. These “shadow narratives” dominated their expectations, and when confronted with a three-dimensional reality that bore little resemblance to the shadows, the prisoners were blinded by the light. Surrounded by images and rhetoric that reduce the fullness of teaching to flat, two-dimensional representations, today's pre-service teachers tend to develop expectations of teaching that resemble the shadows more than they resemble reality. These misaligned expectations often lead to practice shock: the painful and disillusioning cognitive dissonance that comes about when unsustainable expectations collide with real-world practice. Intended as a proactive manual for mitigating practice shock, this book shines a light on the shadows by giving pre-service teachers the tools to examine, confront, and revise their own misaligned expectations of teaching before they reach the point of crisis. Front Matter ....Pages i-x Front Matter ....Pages 1-1 Beginnings (Jeremy Delamarter)....Pages 3-14 Why Expectations Matter (Jeremy Delamarter)....Pages 15-35 One Step Removed (Jeremy Delamarter)....Pages 37-62 Concern, Control, and Change (Jeremy Delamarter)....Pages 63-84 The Heart vs. The Head (Jeremy Delamarter)....Pages 85-116 Front Matter ....Pages 117-117 Losing Your Illusions (Jeremy Delamarter)....Pages 119-148 Becoming Something New (Jeremy Delamarter)....Pages 149-187 So Much Left to Learn (Jeremy Delamarter)....Pages 189-206 Back Matter ....Pages 207-210