Teaching as Principled Practice: Managing Complexity for Social Justice

This book is about a practical vision for effective teacher development for social justice and excellent outcomes for all children and youth, but especially those who have been traditionally underserved by the educational institutions of our country. This vision is encompassed in a set of six principles that underlie the work we do with pre-service teachers: the courses we teach, the supervision we do in the schools, the work we do with the cooperating teachers who open their classrooms to us and our students, and the ongoing conversations we have with our students and with one another.This book is about how one might teach using such underlying principles to guide one’s practice. It speaks directly to pre-service and experienced teachers about a way to think about the challenges of urban education for teachers and children alike by building on a fundamental set of ideas. These notions are at the core of what and how we teach teachers and are at the core of how teachers can think about their own practice in schools. The principles are: teaching is inherently moral work, teaching is an act of inquiry and reflection, learning is a developmental constructivist process, the content of what we teach must be well understood by those who teach and those who learn, teaching is a collegial act, and teaching is political.This book features: each chapter in the text addresses and explores one of the principles, presenting the rationale behind the principle and including several examples of how the principle informs the complicated work done in classrooms; real-life case studies and voices of teachers show the application of each principle; and, responses to each of the chapters/cases by school leaders examine the dilemmas of teachers from principled practice to the work of leadership.