Eight Essential Questions Teachers Ask

Book excerpt: Eight Essential Questions Teachers Ask: A Guidebook for Communicating with Students acknowledges and addresses the essential questions and concerns that emerge for teachers in all stages of development. Using a narrative style that incorporates actual voices of teachers, this book offersreaders relevant research, peer mentoring, communication-focused recommendations, and reflective practice opportunities. This unique resource provides useful strategies for addressing communication questions that emerge in the teacher development process.This book is intended for graduate communication courses and upper division undergraduate communication courses focused on teacher training and development. As such, this book could serve as a stand-alone resource for these courses or it could be a supplement to a longer handbook (given the book isintended to be relatively short by comparison). Additionally, this book could be marketed to teacher training programs and centers that often purchase-in bulk- training materials for new teachers. Generally, the new teachers participating in these courses, programs or centers would likely be MS/MAand PhD level graduate students or lecturers.Eight Essential Questions Teachers Ask is uniquely situated to fill a niche that current communication education and instructional communication handbooks do not because of its distinct approach. First, the book is organized around empirically grounded teacher communication concerns that arepressing to new teachers (and those teachers who teach new teachers). Current books are organized topically or contextually around scholarly lines of inquiry that might not speak to the immediate challenges new teachers face. Second, this book uses a framing mechanism-teacher communication concerns- that is relevant and timely for new teachers as the entryway for introducing instructional communication literature. In this way, the book makes the instructional communication research accessible and pertinent to new teachers who might not otherwise find such comprehensive syntheses applicablefor their immediate teacher preparation needs. Finally, this book uses a narrative style to explore, address, and provide recommendations about managing concerns - emulating styles that often characterize mentoring relationships that new teachers seek out when faced with their concerns. In this way,this style and tone of this book speak to new teachers in ways comprehensive syntheses cannot.The five primary objectives of this book include:1. Acknowledging the lived, experienced communication concerns of new teachers2. Providing a foundation of research essentials that speak to teacher communication concerns3. Harnessing the power of peer guidance to provide insight into teacher communication concerns4. Providing concrete, communication-focused recommendations to mitigate teacher communication concerns5. Encouraging reflective practice about teacher communication concerns