Enter Teaching!: The Essential Guide for Teachers New to Grades 3-6

Who needs a guesstimate of the number of pencils and paperclips to order, a game plan for literature circles, more ways to do science assessments, and a fresh perspective on a difficult behavior problem? All teachers do. But if you're new to the profession, new to the school, or new to a certain grade level, making choices like these feels like stepping out on stage in an unscripted play.Enter Teaching! provides no lines to memorize, just another player's ad-libbing to facilitate the creation of a new role.

According to Mary Kitagawa, teachers direct the most fluid of dramas, but the best teachers do so not from the wings, but by joining their students as fellow cast-members. The teacher's role is to undergird the creative action with structures that are strong but unobtrusive - structures like the ones described in this book: cospectator annotations in the margins of journals, portmanteau concepts that carry extra weight in math, and "communities of T.R.U.S.T."

Covering everything from supplies, fire drills, materials, and procedures to community building, specific instructional strategies, curriculum design, assessment, and professional growth,Enter Teaching! couldn't be more explicit. It reflects what Mary has learned in her thirty-five years of teaching and offers advice on what has worked for her as well as suggestions for preventing some of her flops. But most of all,Enter Teaching! is about finding the latitude to make classroom-based decisions and learning to trust your instincts, observations, and reflections. As Mary herself states, "When advice doesn't make sense, including what you read in this book, return to your classroom and trust what you see. No book can be a mentor . . . and this is advice to which you have absolutely no obligation."

After teaching since 1957, MARY KITAGAWA still thinks answers are just way stations enroute to better questions. First in Michigan and then in Arizona and Massachusetts, she has shared the investigatory zeal of eight- to twelve-year-olds in a broad spectrum of neighborhood schools.