ABSTRACT
This book rests on the assumption that an inquiry-oriented approach to learning to teach provides the best means by which prospective teachers can consider the range of issues they will face in meaningful, effective ways (Tabachnick & Zeichner, 1991). This type of engagement with the work of teaching is essential. Once again, it is important to remember that no mathematical formulas exist for reducing the work of teaching to quantitative relationships among people, processes, and products. Teaching is not only a skill, a set of learned lessons for “delivering a lesson”; who you are, what you think, and how you feel about the people, social conditions, and structure of education matter in an essential way. One cannot deliver a lesson in the way one delivers a pizza-just get it to them and they will eat it. Nor is it simply acquiring the art of developing knowledge in one’s students, or assimilating a set of techniques for controlling and managing student behavior (Zellermayer, 2001). Teaching includes elements related to these domains, but reducing the profession to a list of such activities is to misunderstand the nature of the work.
