At the heart of this chapter’s fertile question is the recognition that effective professional relationships are built – only rarely do they ‘grow themselves’ – and that a range of resources need to be in place for development to happen.

You might be tempted to skip or skim this chapter and jump straight into the case stories. This is understandable as the whole premise of this book is that learning through stories is often more inviting than learning with discursive texts. However, if you do choose to jump into the case stories first, you need to return to this chapter later in order to stand back and see the broader landscape across which you are travelling as you read and write case stories. This metacognitive distance will deepen your understanding of the ways case learning helps you build your skills in problem solving, perspective taking and conditional thinking, which in turn will help you better develop these foundational skills of reflective teaching practice.

This chapter’s fertile question invites you to challenge the assumption that all assessment is meaningful, in that it supports student learning. When assessment is undertaken as an afterthought to learning, or conversely, if teaching is driven by the needs of high-stakes standardised testing, students and their learning are disadvantaged.

Knowing the content of a learning area as a teacher is a different kind of knowledge to knowing the content as a learner. This chapter’s fertile question asks you to consider not only what kinds and how much content you need to know in order to teach it, but how you need to know it.

At the heart of this chapter’s fertile question is the recognition that meeting the needs of diverse learners involves making decisions based on a shifting range of variables that include: 1) understanding who your diverse learners are, 2) recognising what their needs are in a particular context, and 3) knowing how you can meet their needs by selecting appropriate cognitive, socio-emotional or behavioural approaches.

This chapter’s fertile question invites you to consider the range of factors that contribute to effectively managing student behaviour. It challenges the one-dimensional notion that behaviour management is primarily about achieving the compliance of potentially disruptive students and encourages you to analyse the two-way relationship between effective teaching and an orderly classroom.

How we think we read stories or real-life situations, and how we actually read them are often very different. This chapter explores what the differences are, and how they can get in the way of effectively interpreting case stories. You will see how applying a systematic approach to reading case stories helps you become more self-aware and skilful in your interpretive practices. Following a systematic approach will enable you to separate observations from interpretations or evaluations and make you less likely to jump to conclusions. The approach presented in this chapter is the ‘SNAAPI’ steps, a simple five-step inductive reasoning–based process that will help you make sense of both the case stories in this book and the real-life situations you will encounter in schools. The chapter will also introduce three variants of the SNAAPI steps that you can use when you want to be more specialised in your engagement with a case story. All the interpretive approaches can be undertaken individually, but you will gain most benefit from discussing your thinking with others at all stages of the process.

Welcome to Case Learning for Teachers: Strategic Knowledge for Professional Experience. This book is primarily aimed at preservice teachers preparing for placement in schools. However, both the case stories and the model of case learning also provide rich professional learning material for teachers at all career stages. The book’s approach stems from the recognition that reading and writing cases builds the kinds of personal and/or professional knowledge that leads to significant change in thinking, attitudes and practice.

People may enact their cultural identity when they interact at work either consciously or unconsciously. A person's cultural identity can be evident both in interaction with other people who share this aspect of their identity, as well as in interaction with those who do not.