The First Year of Teaching: Classroom Research to Increase Student Learning

For first-year teachers entering the nation’s urban schools, the task of establishing a strong and successful practice is often extremely challenging. In this compelling look at first-year teachers’ practice in urban schools, editors Jabari Mahiri and Sarah Warshauer Freedman demonstrate how a program of systematic classroom research by teachers themselves enables them to effectively target instruction and improve their own practice. The book organizes the teachers’ research into three broad areas, corresponding to issues the new teachers identified as the most challenging. The First Year of Teaching offers an array of classroom scenarios that will spark in-depth discussions in teacher preparation classes and professional development workshops, particularly in the context of problem-based, problem-posing pedagogies.