An engaging overview of who teachers are, the work they do, and the realities of life in the classroom Your Introduction to Education takes readers on a journey into authentic classrooms and guides them through life in real classrooms lived by real teachers and real students. One of the core goals of this work is to help readers discover whether teaching is for them and, if it is, what their potential strengths and weakness as educators might be. The text weaves the real-life experiences of eight teachers and eight students from four schools across the country into its content. These people and places are drawn from urban, suburban, and rural settings, allowing readers to examine teaching and learning from a variety of perspectives.
The 4th Edition has been significantly updated to address topics like preventing bullying, teacher evaluation, social media, cultural and linguistic diversity, LGBTQ students, and teacher effectiveness research.
Your Introduction to Education , 4th Edition is also available via Revel™ , an interactive learning environment that enables students to read, practice, and study in one continuous experience.
Six chapters of this book was included in the custom textbook for my foundations of education masters class.
Overall, I found the information to be well presented. The headings are color coded which really helps when dissecting the text (trust me, at masters level, you do so much reading that you have to learn to skim very well and the better the text features, the better your skimming). There are also nice charts and graphs that enhance the text content.
The only section I had a problem with was the "Schools" chapter. The author has a very obvious bias toward traditional public schools and it interferes with the information presented. The author also needs to check her facts on school choice. She insinuates that private schools involved in school choice can pick and choose what students they take. Had she done her research, she would have found that in Milwaukee School Choice (one of the oldest and most successful school choice systems), this is not true at all and that students also have the right to opt out of religious instruction. If this is not true in another system, it would have been better to specify the specific source of this information.
The other chapters are fine, therefore, I gave the book (what I read of it) three stars.
I did not use the quizzes at the beginning and end of the chapters but I would totally use them in class with undergrads (even if you don't have this text as the text you are using).