Teaching is a complex, exciting, frustrating, and rewarding experience.  It is a highly public enterprise with profound moral and ethical consequences involving students, families, communities, and the future of our nation.  Learning to teach is difficult, time consuming, and humbling and should not be taken lightly.  The skills required for classroom success demand intelligence, flexibility, and explicit, evidence-based knowledge and skills. This class is designed to be part of a purposeful, planned web of experiences to help you become an outstanding teacher.  Nonetheless, the expectations for you are high and the road will be arduous.  Not everyone can become a teacher.  It requires long hours, painful self-examination, creativity, practice, patience, and problem solving. 

Teachers know that many things are happening simultaneously in the classroom, some demanding immediate attention.  There is very little privacy and every comment and behavior that occurs is part of an ever-evolving classroom history--a history with clear impact on the present. Because of these characteristics, classroom life demands specific competencies and continual study and contemplation from the perspectives of both teachers and students. Your shift to a professional perspective is one of the goals of this class.  You have been a student for many years, “an apprentice” of what happens in the classroom, but that experience alone will not help you to become an excellent teacher. In fact, your observations were personal and superficial and did not account for all of the nuances within the classroom environment. Your conclusions about school were based on your own personal experiences.  These are not sufficient for dealing with the bureaucracy of schools and the diversity of settings in which you will find yourself.

In this class you will have the opportunity to develop your professional understandings based on both well-grounded theories and empirical evidence that have been shown to increase student learning.  More than just transmitting knowledge, proficient teachers establish a learning community that meets the needs of all students through the development of productive relationships and the provision of support for academic success.  We will study instructional design, instructional planning and delivery, assessments, and professional behavior by asking the most basic of questions:  Who will we teach and how will student characteristics impact our classrooms?  Where will we teach? How do we know what to teach?  How is assessment related to student learning?  How do we design, plan and implement our students’ instructional experiences?  What is good teaching and how can theory inform good practice? As we work toward finding answers to these questions we will address the most important question—our essential question—What is the purpose of teaching in our society?