Editor's Introduction: Communities of Practice

What is and/or what should be the most important commitments we make as teacher educators? To whom? For what purposes? And, in what ways? In the recently released book, What it Means to be a Teacher: The Reality and Gift of Teaching, author Michael Gose looks back over a long career and posits sage-like advocacy for what it means for teachers to think of themselves as necessarily independent from the ways the institution of schooling defines teachers' roles. Many teachers at some point in their careers wrestle with the dilemma of how best to respond to their inner-driven moral imperatives, oftentimes at odds with their perceived roles and sense of professional responsibilities in a school system. Gose writes directly to what is truly at the heart of the learning experience, minimizing the importance of schooling structures that have little to do with education. His book speaks to those of us in the teacher education profession about the ways in which we too often get caught up in responding to others' "reforms" and redirects our attention to the essence of what really matters, while embodying Eliott Eisner's (1994) notion of "educational connoisseurship."