A powerful, rational guidebook to creating genuinely effective education, written in a manner useful not just for...
Ideas from a former principal on what makes for an exceptional teacher.
Accountability and autonomy are the two guiding lights for prescribing changes in our schools, and as Green notes early on in this book, the two principles are often at loggerheads. Accountability proponents believe in leveraging the power of data to study which teachers’ students are meeting or exceeding goals; opponents claim that it stultifies educators, diminishing the profession, and ineffectively measuring teacher and student “success.” Autonomy proponents believe that if you elevate the profession and let the teachers steer their ships, the trust, freedom and respect will enable them to do their very best. Green gives both of these views credence but goes further to suggest that the reverence surrounding the best teachers is misguided, in that it elevates the “natural born educator” mythos that suggests an inborn talent. Green deflates the “I could never do what they do” aura of the best teachers, but in a good way. In extensive conversations and observations that uncover the approaches that the best educators share, she distills how they apply those approaches in similar ways despite differences in extraversion/introversion, humorous/serious teaching approaches, and flexible/rigid standards. Green goes deeper than bromides about student engagement and motivation, digging into data about student success as well as examining the means used to collect the data. She also chronicles her visits with professionals at multiple levels (administrative, support, frontline teachers) through various successes and failures, gleaning wisdom from both—just as the best teachers would have their students do.
A powerful, rational guidebook to creating genuinely effective education, written in a manner useful not just for schoolteachers, but everyone involved in the care of children.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-08159-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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