Teaching With Your Mouth Shut (Donald Finkel)

This slim book presents the author's philosophy about education and learning. He is passionate about teachers doing things other than lecture and other things he calls Telling - presenting information to students with the idea that this will cause them to learn. Instead, he says, teachers need ton craft experiences and situations in which students will actively engage in creating their own understanding. Some of his specific ideas I find exciting and will try myself, at least in modified form, such as conceptual workshops (very similar to the in-class activities I do in some classes) and responding to student papers with an actual letter (similar to what I already do in my Honors class). Others strike me as unworkable and frankly appalling. He holds up as a model a teacher who tells students on day one (a Monday) that on Tuesdays the class will be entirely run by students as a discussion of the assigned Shakespeare play, and he won't tell them what to do. The next day he sits at one seat in a circle, silently, reading his copy of the play and jotting in a notebook. If nobody else has said anything after 5 minutes he sighs and says, "Remember, I won't tell you what to do. Discuss the play." He is then silent for the rest of the two-hour class. This is to encourage independence in the students and a democratic environment in the class, but all I can imagine is fruitless struggle and resentment. I am apparently not as enlightened as Dr. Finkel.