ABSTRACT
To say these times are harrowing seems true enough. Change is happening so quickly that it is hard to keep track of what’s what, who’s who, and what matters. At least that is how it feels to me when I think about my work of teaching teachers to teach school in urban America. In school, change is the only thing we can predict with certainty. Yet change makes the work of teaching school difficult. It makes teaching teachers hard work as well. That is what this chapter is about-the hard work of teaching teachers to meet the challenge of change. I will begin by exploring the issue of change in school settings in order to lay out the challenge of change for teaching and teacher education and then I will provide examples from my own practice of my attempts to meet this challenge. Thirdly I will explore the results of those efforts. I will present the analysis of an example from my teaching as means for considering how my students think about their work in schools, and their preparation for doing it. As might be predicted, these results raise new questions. These new questions, and the persistence of always facing new questions, explains, perhaps, the most challenging part of dealing with change in the first place-its unending, enduring nature. Deliberating the challenge of change in school settings is where we will begin our consideration of what teachers need to know and be able to do to meet it. From there, we can look at the subsequent challenge of preparing them for that daunting task.
