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.

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.

Teaching Critical Thinking (bell hooks)

Author bell hooks (who uses lower-case for her name for some reason) is all the rage at my institution. People have read and extolled her earlier books on teaching, and since I'm interested in improving critical thinking, I picked up her latest. I was very disappointed. It's not that what she has to say is incorrect or that it is not useful, but it is not what I was expecting from a book subtitled "Practical Wisdom." I want to know how to increase the kind of scientific skepticism that is fundamental in my profession; she wants to increase her students' freedom from what she calls the "colonization by a paternalistic dominator culture." There are no specific, practical ideas here. She offers generalizations such as: "Negative conflict-based discussion almost always invites the mind to close, while conversation as a mode of interaction calls us to open our mind [sic]" (p. 45). How, specifically, does one make conversation work in the classroom? She is silent on this. This book is wonderful if you want a philosophical, moral, and feeling-based discussion of what is important in education. It does not help with the day-to-day structure of a class, at least not for me.

Teaching for Critical Thinking (Stephen Brookfield)

Parts of this book were very helpful and insightful. I will get a lot of use out of his analysis of the different disciplines of critical thinking (it is no surprise to me that I find the scientific, hypothesis-testing view most congenial). I also found some of his suggested exercises for critical thinking very interesting, and may adopt some of them in my future courses.