How to treat pizza dough

The recipe I use to make pizza dough at home calls for letting it rise for one hour. I'm just not sure what to do with it after that. There's this "crust" that forms over the hour. Am I supposed to knead the dough all over again, to get it all smooth? Doesn't that defeat the whole point of letting it lift? Am I supposed to get it into the pizza oven and flattened out with a minimum of "jostling"?