Koch - Teach

Senior Acquisitions Editor: Steve Scoble

Senior Content Development Editor: Jennifer Jovin

Associate Content Development Editor: Chelsea Neve

Content Development Editor: Kathryn Abbott

Editorial Assistant: Elizabeth You

Production Editor: Jane Martinez

Copy Editor: Diane Wainwright

Typesetter: Hurix Digital

Proofreader: Eleni-Maria Georgiou

Indexer: Joan Shapiro

Cover Designer: Gail Buschman

Marketing Manager: Jillian Ragusa

For the college or graduate student, making the decision to become a teacher is often fraught with uncertainty, complexity, and confusion. What should I know? What courses do I take? How do I get certified? How can I be sure this career choice is right for me? Although some aspiring teachers approach this journey with more personal confidence than others, most find it challenging to make the transition from the college classroom to their own classrooms. Teach is designed to help them meet that challenge. I wrote this text in response to colleagues who felt I could speak to future teachers plainly and clearly.

The most important task of this text is to invite readers to look inside themselves to their own dispositions for teaching and to look outside of themselves to the demands of an ever-changing culture filled to the brim with iPhones, iPads, tablets, laptops, and endless text messages. Choosing to become a teacher requires that one analyzes his or her own personal strengths and weaknesses to ask if this profession is a good fit between ones personal and cognitive attributes and the demands of the teaching profession. This is not a simple exercise, so Teach encourages readers to think sincerely about the complex aspects of a good fit.

One overarching idea of the text can be summed up by this statement: We teach who we are. By this, I mean that an individuals entire self is present in the classroom and who we are, what we believe, what we think about ourselves and our students are exposed through the dynamic processes of teaching and learning. By the time a student finishes this book, he or she should have a clearer personal sense of what it may mean to be a teacher.