Proactive Images for Pre-Service Teachers

Book excerpt: 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.