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For and About
Teachers
Teaching in Mind:
How Teacher Thinking Shapes
Education
By Judith Lloyd Yero
Teachers!
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Are
you tired of being ignored in the process of educational planning and
improvement?
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Are
you weary of being told what you "should" do by educational experts
who don't recognize your own expertise?
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Have
you forgotten that YOU are at the heart of any meaningful change in education?
In the wealth of rhetoric on school improvement and educational reform,
teachers are consistently ignored. Historically, teachers have been perceived as
constants in the educational equation, much like the books, desks, and other
inanimate objects in the educational environment. Research repeatedly demonstrates
that the most important factor in a student's learning experience is the quality
of teaching. Yet rather than determine what exemplary teachers do and why they do
it, efforts have been made to reduce "quality teaching" to a checklist
that can be added to the list of what teachers "should" do.
Quality teaching cannot be characterized by a simple checklist of behaviors and
attitudes that can be "taught" to teachers. Effective teachers come in
many shapes, sizes, and temperaments. Their "quality" arises from the
personality and thinking of individual teachers, the beliefs they have about
teaching and learning, the way they conceptualize their work, and the way in which
they interact with students.
Teachers' personal beliefs and values provide the unconscious foundation for their
behavior. The metaphors they use to describe their work shape the world in which
they and their students operate. The ways in which teachers perceive the
world--create their mental models of reality--are highly individualistic.
Therefore, no two classrooms are, or can be, the same.
Teaching in Mind: How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education digs deeply
into those individual differences. It probes the realms of subjective
experience--the beliefs, values, presuppositions, metaphors, and meanings that
shape a teacher's personal world. Teaching in Mind is much more than
a book for teachers. It is a book about teachers--a book about you.
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