This book provides tools to help pre-service teachers and teacher-preparation programs identify, evaluate, and respond to misaligned expectations early in the teacher-preparation sequence. Plato tells the story of prisoners who mistake the shadows on the wall of their cave for flesh-and-blood reality. These shadow narratives dominated their expectations, and when confronted with a three-dimensional reality that bore little resemblance to the shadows, the prisoners were blinded by the light. Surrounded by images and rhetoric that reduce the fullness of teaching to flat, two-dimensional representations, today's pre-service teachers tend to develop expectations of teaching that resemble the shadows more than they resemble reality. These misaligned expectations often lead to practice shock: the painful and disillusioning cognitive dissonance that comes about when unsustainable expectations collide with real-world practice. Intended as a proactive manual for mitigating practice shock,this book shines a light on the shadows by giving pre-service teachers the tools to examine, confront, and revise their own misaligned expectations of teaching before they reach the point of crisis. 

Jeremy Delamarter is Associate Professor and Director of Alternative Routes to Certification at the College of Education at Northwest University, USA.

1. Beginnings.- 2. Why Expectations Matter.- 3. One Step Removed.- 4. Concern, Control, and Change.- 5. The Heart vs. The Head.- 6. Losing Your Illusions.- 7. Becoming Something New.- 8. So Much Left to Learn.