Because Teaching Matters: An Introduction to the Profession

Because Teaching Matters provides teachers with a realistic depiction of today's classrooms while highlighting the enormous impact that teaching has on everyday lives. The book is organized around five professional commitments -learning from multiple sources of knowledge, using the curriculum responsibly, embracing diversity, meeting the needs of individual students, and contributing actively to the profession - It helps teachers make decisions and take responsibility for the consequences of those choices, emphasizing that the decision to teach is a serious one that can be extremely rewarding. This revised edition focuses on diversity throughout, with new material on the latest academic content standards, teaching students with disabilities, modern classroom technology, the role of legislation and federal funding, and other updates to reflect the current context of teaching and teacher preparation. The updates also account for new societal and educational contexts post-pandemic. While not entirely about the pandemic, the new edition serves prospective teacher candidates who themselves have experienced a disruption in their PK-12 educations because of the pandemic. Therefore, the book addresses the ruptures it has caused on multiple fronts, many of which touch on the education system and have affected every student, teacher, and family.