Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (Stephen Brookfield)

Stephen Brookfield is inspiring and dynamic in his approach to teaching. In this volume he dissects what it means to be critically reflective: to question your assumptions, uncover your biases, empower your students, and open your mind to different ways of understanding your own teaching. There are a lot of specific techniques in here that can be very useful. I particularly like what he calls the Critical Incident Report (though the name seriously needs to be changed), which invites students to reflect on their own experiences in the classroom. Through this report, not only do students become more reflective themselves, but teachers get vital feedback on how their practices are experienced from the other side of the desk. Not everything in this volume works for me, and Brookfield does tend to ramble on, but overall it is quite variable.