SITE CONTENTS: ICD Home Casebooks Groupwork in Diverse Classrooms Diversity in the Classroom Case Methods in Teacher Education The Intern Teacher Casebook The Mentor Teacher Casebook NPEAT Indices Facilitator's Forum Bibliography Order Form

THE INTERN TEACHER CASEBOOK Edited by Judith H. Shulman & Joel A. Colbert, San Francisco: Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development [now WestEd], 1988 A common lament by both teachers and administrators is that teacher education programs do not adequately prepare neophytes for today’s urban classroom. They complain that university faculty place too much emphasis on generic pedagogical principles and not enough on the reality of the classroom. The Intern Teacher Casebook tries to address this chasm by providing a tool for faculty to link theory with practice. The authors are novice secondary mentors in the Los Angeles Unified School District who tell, with candor rarely seen in print, what it is like to instruct teenagers in inner-city classrooms. Their carefully crafted narratives of actual experiences, together with commentaries by other teachers and educational scholars, provide a powerful tool through which teachers can learn from one another, across the boundaries of a school site. "No doubt this casebook is another rung up the ladder of effective teacher training. It adds teachers’ own voices in materials used to train them...and provides graphic and dramatic examples of the experiences that await, and the frustrations and rewards of grappling with the reality of teaching in an inner-city school...The casebook is intriguing for what it reveals about the process of learning through experience...about the benefits teachers received from writing vignettes about their first-year experiences, and about the usefulness of casebook materials in teacher training."–John Hollifield, R&D Preview The Intern Teacher Casebook, $10.50 + S&H (see order form) Return to Casebook page