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.

Examines the sources of misaligned teaching expectations using specific, real-world examples Provides concrete, user-friendly tools for pre-service teachers to identify and categorize their teaching expectations Illustrates the psychological effects of misaligned teaching expectations and offer practical solutions for overcoming them Advocates for intentional and structured expectation management as a regular part of teacher preparation programs Offers an array of tools to combat the ill-effects of practice shock

Autorentext

Jeremy Delamarter is Associate Professor and Director of Alternative Routes to Certification at the College of Education at Northwest University, USA.

Inhalt

1. Beginnings.- 2. Why Expectations Matter.- 3. One Step Removed.- 4. Concern, Control, and Change.- 5. The Heart vs. The Head.- 6. Losing Your Illusions.- 7. Becoming Something New.- 8. So Much Left to Learn.