Teach with Confidence: Five Domains for Managing Life in Classrooms

Teach with Confidence provides new insights into successfully managing classroom life for preservice and beginning teachers. The broad concept of classroom management is explored in the domains of planning, reflecting, knowing students, collaborating, and theorizing. The exploration of domains weaves in stories from student teachers with practical advice from the author to show how beliefs, knowledge, and skill in building relationships are critical elements of excellent and successful teaching. This book takes a culturally responsive approach, premised on the notion that successful teachers truly know and understand the lives and needs of their students, and plan their teaching accordingly. The research presented coupled with decades of in-classroom experiences are the foundation for providing beginning teachers with confidence, knowledge, and the ability to enact practices that are consonant with their reasons for choosing teaching.

Alexandra Miletta taught 5th and 6th grade in Edmonds, Washington and has been engaged in childhood education in various capacities for the past two decades. After earning a B.A. from Wellesley College and an M.A. from Syracuse University in Art History, she lived and worked in Italy, and then completed her PhD in Educational Studies at the University of Michigan. She was first a professor of Childhood Education at The City College of New York, CUNY for six years and then a tenured professor at Mercy College in New York, and is the coauthor of Classroom Conversations: A Collection of Classics for Parents and Teachers published in 2008 by The New Press. An active member of the educational blogging community from 2013-2017, she has also published research and presented in conferences on practitioner inquiry, aesthetic education, Reggio Emilia, and moral dimensions of life in classrooms, as well as published book and film reviews. She currently lives in Rome, Italy.