I spend most of my time teaching inservice teachers in graduate courses on a commuter campus. I used to be astonished at how little these teachers knew about educational psychology when they came to my Advanced Educational Psychology course. They had all taken an undergraduate course on educational psychology in order to obtain their teacher certification. At first I thought maybe they were dense; but I quickly discovered that they were often very bright people, who learned educational psychology very well during my course. Therefore, I decided that maybe it was the teachers of these undergraduate courses who were dense - or at least very poor teachers.

But then I was assigned to teach an undergraduate course myself; and soon my own previous undergraduates started showing up in my graduate courses - and they also had huge gaps in their knowledge of educational psychology. It finally became obvious to me what the problem was: the undergraduates simply lacked the applied experience that the inservice teachers had obtained. When I talked to the undergrads about Piaget, for example, they would understand the information - and they even enjoyed the way I presented it and gave me high ratings on my evaluations. When I offered the same information to inservice teachers, however, they would not only understand the information, enjoy the presentation, and pass the tests - they would also achieve more practical insights. They would say things to themselves like, "So that's why Johnny couldn't solve those math problems!" or "I always thought there was something wrong with this chapter in the science book. Piaget has a good explanation of the nature of the problem." Undergraduates can, of course, come to similar insights; but the probability of those insights occurring during a short period of time in a relatively artificial setting is simply not as great as the likelihood that they will occur during the working life of a real teacher.

I'm sure it would be possible to design an undergraduate curriculum that would make it more probable that these insights will occur; and perhaps many readers of this book will be working and learning within such a framework. I'm also sure that there are many inservice teachers who profit almost not at all from their experiences - because they do not connect their problems and experiences with principles like those discussed in this book.

However, a book like this can supply you with a framework that will make it more likely that you will use sound educational principles to solve problems when they arise.