Rethinking Teacher Education

Selma Wassermann has long and extensive experience with teacher education programs and is a founding member of the innovative Professional Development Program at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of more than 20 books and articles about teacher education, including Mastering the Art of Teaching (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), This Teaching Life (Teachers College Press, 2004), and “Changing Course: Re-thinking Teacher Education Course Design” (Childhood Education, 2017).

Too often, preservice teachers passively learn all the right stuff of teaching, preached to them by professors in lecture mode, arming them with the knowledge of what good teachers do, but without understanding how to apply what they know. Dr. Wassermann makes the compelling case that, from the outset, teachers in training need to learn the way they want their students to learn, by observing, analysing and applying what they know, through activities that require them to test their knowledge, figure out what went wrong, and find their own solutions. Dr. Selma Wassermann is the quintessential master of teaching for thinking. A decade after I began my teaching career, I was fortunate enough to have been one of her students at Simon Fraser University and to have experienced, first hand, this transformative learning paradigm.

• Preface: The harpsichord theory of learning to teachAcknowledgementsIntroduction: What’s wrong with teacher education?Chapter 1: Where do we start?Chapter 2: Connecting means with endsChapter 3: To Know, to understand, and to know how: a theoretical frameworkChapter 4: Some Radical Ideas Part II: Developing CompetenceChapter 5: Introduction to Part IIChapter 6: Developing Competence: Kids: Learning to observe, diagnose and deal with individual behavior Chapter 7: Developing Competence: Teacher-Student InteractionsChapter 8: Developing Competence: The teacher as curriculum makerChapter 9: Developing Competence: Student teachingChapter 10: In retrospectAppendixBibliography