Letās start with a story.
My first day of student teaching didnāt go exactly like I thought it was going to. As a K-12 student, I had attended a fairly affluent, suburban high school where most of the students were just like me: White, upper-middle class, relatively unaware of the outside world. When I decided to become a teacher, I realized that my homogenous educational experiences were a liability. I needed to be able to teach all students, not just the ones who looked or lived like I did. Because I needed to broaden my horizons, I asked my university to place me in the roughest, most āinner-cityā student teaching placement they could find. They complied.
The school they chose was in a crime-ridden neighborhood surrounded by federal housing projects. The students were 98% non-white, and many of them lived in poverty. Though not exactly crumbling, the building itself was worn down and tired, and the school-supplied books literally fell apart in my studentsā hands. At first glance, it was the perfect stereotype of an inner-city school. Consequently, when I walked in on that first day, I was brimming with confidence, because I knew exactly how this was going to play out. After all, I had seen Freedom Writers (Devito et al. 2007) at least five times.
The film had come out in theaters the year before, and I had devoured it. It told the true story of Erin Gruwell, a lawyer-turned-teacher who found herself teaching freshman English to a group of mostly Black and Latino kids in the āhood. Their lives were marred by gang violence, incarceration, distant parents, apathetic teachers, hostile administrators: the list goes on. But, through patience and dogged persistence, Ms. Gruwell won her studentsā trust and taught them to believe in themselves. She stood by them against overwhelming odds, and their original resistance gave way to admiration and respect. In the end, she transformed their lives by caring for them when no one else would, and the rough and tumble urban students eventually learned to love the plucky White teacher from the other side of the tracks.
Like I said, I had seen the movie quite a few times, and I knew the narrative arc well. I was prepared for students with hard-scrabble lives. I was prepared for callous administrators and burnt-out teachers. I was prepared for the violence of the streets to spill over into the classroom. I was prepared for racial confrontation and, eventually, catharsis and reconciliation. I was prepared for all of this and more, but I was not prepared for what I actually encountered.
What caught me so off guard that first day (and nearly every day after that) was the simple fact that, by and large, my students wanted to learn. I did not have to break through their tough exteriors. I didnāt have sleepless nights trying to figure out how to reach them. They were willing participants in their own educations from the very first day. They were engagedāor, perhaps more specifically, they were no more disengaged than any other group of sophomores reading A Tale of Two Citiesāand they were not afraid to show it. They cared about the material, and they readily applied it to their own lives.
I was bewildered. How was I supposed to ride in on horseback and save the day if no one needed saving? I remember telling another student teacher in the building that it was as if these kids didnāt know how inner-city students were supposed to behave .
It just got stranger. The other teachers in the building were experienced, caring, and committed educators, and the principal was trusted and admired by students and faculty alike. āHavenāt you people ever seen a teacher movie?ā I felt like screaming at anyone who would listen. āItās not supposed to be this way. How can I be the only one on their side if everyone here is on their side?ā
My student teaching was turning into a nightmare: students were engaged, teachers were competent, administrators were supportive, parents were responsive and grateful, and the curriculum was relevant. Things could hardly get any worse.
It turned out, however, that my expectations were not entirely wrong. Some of the things that I had expected to see did, in fact, take place. For example, one of my students was shot, the innocent victim of random gang violence. He lived and eventually returned to class, but we were all deeply shaken. Or, there was the senior girl with a wicked sense of humor who, I discovered to my horror, had become the sole caretaker for her younger brother after her mother had disappeared. She prostituted herself to make ends meet. Most days, she would sit in the back of the class and suck her thumb.
And we did have occasional moments of racial confrontation, though I cannot say that we ever reached the reconciliation stage. Most of the time, these critical encounters were brought about by my unintentional stereotyping. I remember with great shame the time a sophomore girl raised her hand and said, āMr. D, could you please stop using basketball metaphors? I know weāre all Black, but not all of us play basketball. You can use a wider variety of references. Weāll get it.ā Thatās a word-for-word quote. I know, because the incident is seared into my brain.
At other times, our critical racial encounters emerged from deep and meaningful discussions about the texts we were reading, such as when a senior asked why the class had to read Elie Wieselās holocaust memoir Night. āI donāt mean to be rude,ā he said, ābut why are we reading about White peopleās suffering? Thereās so much we could be reading about our own suffering, about the injustices that have happened to us.ā The discussion that ensued was powerful and moving, though I do not know that any hearts or minds were changed. I do know that we all listened to each other, and that no one, not even the young man who raised the question, spoke in anger.
But perhaps the greatest disparity between what Iād expected and what I actually experienced was how ānormalā my students were. Remember, the White, suburban schools I had attended were my only frames of reference. So what surprised me more than anything else were the similarities between my studentsā lives and my own. I do not mean to minimize the very real differences between us, because they were profound. But it was our similarities that caught me off guard.
For example, my students were generally more concerned about last nightās dance or tomorrowās track meet than they were about whatever book we were reading at the moment. The social aspects of school dominated the academic, just as they had for my friends and me. Many of these students came from broken homes with absentee parents. However, the same had also been true for many of my friends. On the other hand, many of my students had parents who were deeply invested in their lives, just like my parents were for me. When looking at my students, I saw the same pain of failed relationships, the same fears and hopes about the future, the same sense of invincibility, the same strange combination of goofy immaturity and deep insight that I saw when I looked back at me and my friends during our high school days. In short, although there were some very real and important differences between us, particularly in terms of economics and the experience of race, I was primarily struck by how much we had in common.
Again, this was not what I expected. There was a way this story was supposed to play out, and it wasnāt happening. Everyone was off script. The characters I had expected to see never showed up. Key roles in the narrative went unfilled. There was no villain, for example: no hostile administrator or looming specter of a standardized test that had to be defeated. Though there were many frank and important conversations about race, there was no one pivotal encounter that changed the way we related to each other. In fact, most days were fairly mundane. We worked on grammar or paragraph organization. We unpacked metaphors and attached meaning to symbols. We sort-of succeeded in making Jane Eyreās flight from Thornfield relevant to a group of sleepy 16-year-olds. We struggled through Shakespeare and learned to like it. In short, it was a normal high school English class, no better than most, but certainly no worse. The bulk of our time was spent doing the regular, day-to-day work of learning how to be literary scholars. This work is incredibly rewarding, but it is not always exciting, and you almost never see it in the movies. The teachers in the movies never bother to teach topic sentences; they are too busy āinspiringā their students.
This brings me to the heart of this introduction and, in many ways, the heart of this book. Somewhere along the way, I had developed a skewed and distorted sense of what actually happens in an English classroom. Iād fundamentally misunderstood the work of a teacher. As a result, when I came face to face with the realities of classroom practice, I was hurt and confused. I hadnāt fully known what I was signing up for, and finding out the truth was a painful process. I had expected one thing, but something else happened instead, and it took me by surprise.
In the world of teacher preparation, this phenomenon is known as āpractice shock ā (Meijer et al. 2011). It is the painful, disorienting, and sometimes disillusioning confrontation with reality that many pre-service and rookie teachers experience when they first enter the field. Years of research tell us that candidates enter into teacher preparation programs with pre-existing ideas about what they will experience in the classroom. They have formed these ideas based on their own experiences as students, their personal histories, the representations they have seen of teachers in film and other media, and even on the experiences of friends and family (e.g., Britzman 2003). Much as it was in my case, pre-service teachers carry with them a constructed set of expectations , and those expectations shape and determine the ways in which their subsequent experiences in the field will be interpreted.
Unfortunately, a growing body of evidence tells us that these expectations are usually wrong. The mental models of teaching that pre-service teachers bring with them into the classroom often bear only a passing resemblance to the daily practices of actual teachers, and pre-service teachers too often form misaligned expectations of good teaching based on incomplete or one-sided information. Even more unfortunately, the evidence also tells us that the alignment between expectations and reality is a critical component in a novice teacherās development (e.g., Cooper and He 2012; Day and Kington 2008; Kirbulut et al. 2012; Sexton 2008). Expectations play a powerful role in determining how we will interpret the world around us. For example, most student teachers would be overjoyed to have students who are smart, engaged, and fairly well-behaved. But, because I had expected to encounter resistance, and because I had constructed an identity based on my ability to overcome that resistance, I was disappointed by the reality I faced. An otherwise satisfactory situation was rendered unsatisfactory due to my misaligned expectations.
I am not the only teacher to experience this phenomenon, although I may be one of the few to have been disappointed by well-behaved students. The collision of expectation and reality often results in cognitive dissonance . According to Beijaard et al. (2004), teachers whose expectations are misaligned with actual teaching practice often feel torn between their imagined world and the world they are facing. If unaddressed, these feelings can give way to ādisappointment, frustration, anger, guilt, and hurtā (Hastings 2010, p. 211) and can even result in teachers leaving the profession early (Chong et al. 2011). While misaligned expectations are by no means the only factors contributing to a pre-service teacherās success (or lack thereof), they play a meaningful role in shaping teachersā interpretations of their experiences, and they are far too important to be ignored.
The Goals of This Book
The pages that follow are intended to help pre-service teachers identify their misaligned expectations of teaching and to respond to them in meaningful and constructive ways. While other books on teacher-expectations exist, they are almost exclusively aimed at in-service teachers who have already been teaching for a few years and who have already reached some sort of crisis point. By and large, these supports are reactive, not proactive. They are designed for after-the-fact damage control.
What this book provides instead are structural supports that enable pre-service teachers to examine, confront, a...