“It is the finely tuned reflection on children as whole human beings in classrooms, her strengths and limitations as teacher, and stubborn effort to keep getting better that makes this a remarkable tale.”
—From the Foreword by Larry Cuban

“This small masterpiece will change the way teachers see and live their craft, how they experience and might re-imagine their teaching lives. It is essential reading for people taking their first tentative steps toward teaching, as well as for those who have spent a lifetime on this complex and twisty path, and for most everyone in-between.”
—William Ayers, Distinguished Professor, College of Education, University of Illinois at Chicago

This important memoir of professional development in action follows bestselling author Selma Wassermann from her dismal beginnings, struggling for control over her students, to enjoying the kind of teaching in which teacher and students are truly partners in the process. This is the story of learning to respect students, to allow them choices, to engage them in their own self-discoveries, to relinquish control, to make informed diagnoses of individual learning needs and create teaching strategies to address them, and, ultimately, to stand up for what one believes is right and good in the education of children.

This dynamic volume shows us:

• Professional development and what it actually looks like in the field.
• A new framework for teaching and learning presented through classroom applications.
• A teacher who consciously chose a pathway of continued and sustained self-examination, where learning on the job (often alone) is essential.
• The need for teachers to take risks in the classroom to determine what went wrong and why, in order to make the necessary adjustment to modify their practice.

Selma Wassermann is Professor Emerita in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. She is a coauthor of The New Teaching Elementary Science: Who’s Afraid of Spiders? and the author of Introduction to Case Method Teaching: A Guide to the Galaxy and Serious Players in the Primary Classroom.