The New Teacher Book-3rd Edition

Newly revised and expanded third edition!

This expanded third edition of The New Teacher Book grew out of Rethinking Schools workshops with early career teachers. It offers practical guidance on how to flourish in schools and classrooms and connect in meaningful ways with students and families from all cultures and backgrounds.

2019 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist

Gold Award Winner in the Independent Book Publisher Association (IBPA) Award’s non-fiction audiobook category

Reviews
Table of Contents
Introduction
Resources
Media

“I wish I had had The New Teacher Book when I started. But I have it now. We all have it now. Read it. Learn from it. Use it to change the world.”
Lily Eskelsen Garcia
President, National Education Association

“This new edition of The New Teacher Book delivers powerful stories and lessons that will help new teachers infuse social justice ideals in their classrooms every day.”
Randi Weingarten
President, American Federation of Teachers

“The New Teacher Book offers a roadmap for sustaining a career as a social justice educator. It’s the kind of vision we need to fill classrooms with learning and hope.”
Linda Darling-Hammond
Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus, Stanford University

“This book shows how teachers can work with compassion, creativity, and a commitment to social justice. For teachers who seek to make a difference, it will be a source of inspiration and a guide for how to sustain yourself during these difficult times.”
Pedro Noguera
Distinguished Professor of Education, UCLA

“Rethinking Schools is an invaluable teaching, union, and movement resource, and The New Teacher Book shows the way.”
Alex Caputo Pearl
President, United Teachers of Los Angeles

“My first year of teaching at an urban high school was trial by fire, and in my attempts to teach my students well, I was always looking for books that would illuminate my experience and hone my teaching practice. Most books were fine; there was nothing necessarily wrong with them. But they always seemed to neglect the things that mattered most.

The New Teacher Book is an outlier in that it is solely comprised of what matters most in education today. From how to set up a classroom to what to teach inside of it, The New Teacher Book covers the questions that confound and dilemmas that paralyze new teachers from a holistic, anti-racist, student-centered perspective. It strikes the perfect balance of pieces that comfort and pieces that challenge.”
Rose Peterson
High School English Teacher, Milwaukee, WI

Introduction

When the editors of Rethinking Schools first conceived of this book, we thought back to our days as new teachers. We hoped to create the book we needed in those sometimes exhilarating, sometimes lonely, often hard first days of our teaching careers. This book is meant as a conversation among colleagues. We hope it is a conversation that helps you keep your vision and values intact as you struggle in institutions that may or may not be those citadels of idealism where you imagined yourself teaching.

We wrote this book because it’s important for the profession that new teachers with social justice ideals stay in the classroom. Our communities need teachers who see the beauty and intelligence of every student who walks through their doors and who are willing to keep trying to reach those who have already been told they aren’t worthy. Our students need teachers who value students’ home languages and who know how to build academic strength from those roots.

We need teachers who learn how to develop curriculum that ties students’ lives, history, and academic disciplines together to demonstrate their expertise when top-down curriculum mandates explode across a district. Our school districts need teachers who can advocate against the dumbing-down of curriculum, against testing mania, and against turning our classrooms over to corporate-created curriculum. Our country needs teachers who understand the connections between race, class, and tracking. How else do we make a lasting change?

We wrote this book because we want you to hold on to those impulses that brought you to teaching: a deep caring for students, the opportunity to be the one who sparks student growth and change, as well as the desire to be involved in work that matters. We need teachers who want to work in a place where human connections matter more than profit.

We wrote this book because we have had days — many days — where our teaching aspirations did not meet the reality of the chaos we encountered. We have experienced those late afternoons crying-alone-in-the-classroom kind of days when a lesson failed or we felt like our students hosted a party in the room and we were the uninvited guests. We wrote this book hoping it might offer solace and comfort on those long days when you wonder if you are cut out to be a teacher after all.

We also wrote this book because we understand the connection between what happens behind the classroom door and what happens outside of it. A key skill for new teachers is to see ourselves as defenders of public schools — getting involved in our local and national education unions, connecting with allies among parents, community groups, other unions, everyone who has a stake in fighting privatization and corporate rule.

Given the full court press against public schools, we need to remind all teachers to not be so classroom-focused that we don’t pay attention to the larger political context that is shaping our lives in the classroom. The other reason to open the classroom door and peer outside is that new teachers’ survival often depends on connecting with other teachers for support and assistance for social, political, and pedagogical reasons. Isolated new teachers are bound to burn out.

There is a huge difference between having lots of book knowledge about a given area — literature, history, math, science — and knowing how to translate that knowledge into lessons that help students learn. All teachers, new and veteran, need skills to develop curriculum that celebrates the delightful aspects of our students’ lives. And we need strategies that address the tragedy of some students’ lives and the tragedy that the world delivers: misogyny, racism, homophobia, poverty, war. We need to discover ways to weave these into our curriculum. That takes time.

Rethinking Schools editors have assembled numerous books that focus on creating social justice curriculum: from Rethinking Columbus to Rethinking Mathematics to Teaching for Black Lives to Rethinking Sexism, Gender, and Sexuality. We hope you will look to them for curricular help. In all of our books, and in our quarterly Rethinking Schools magazine, we celebrate the lessons and units and strategies that worked for our students, that created days when we walked out of the building celebrating the joy of teaching.

And what we know from our years in the classroom is that we only get good at it when we do it year after year. So we wrote this book to assure you that you will get better as the years move on if you continue to study your classroom, hone your craft, read professional literature, keep up with news, and connect with your colleagues and communities. Teaching is an art. Keep practicing.

Available in:

Discussion Guide:

Newly revised and expanded third edition!

Table of Contents:

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1: Starting Strong

Chapter 2: Teaching for Social Justice

Chapter 3: Challenges and Opportunities

Chapter 4: Measuring What Matters

Chapter 5: Beyond the Classroom

Introduction

In the Media