Writing principally for teachers-in-training and for new teachers, Guy Claxton offers a fresh approach to what is often a stuffy and polemical area. New teachers today are being bombarded from all sides with advice, prescriptions and demands about what they ought to be, and about personal and professional standards they ought to attain. The person they are gets to feel more and more ignored, unvalued and inadequate. The message of The Little Ed Book is that the answers to all the questions a teacher must confront – both practical and ideological – are already within him or her, and that, whatever they are, they are worthy of respect. Just as a map of a city is useless unless you can locate yourself, so you must find and value the teacher that you are, before you can become the teacher you can be.
