Teacher Training Books

Full disclosure: I know the author personally through taking a course with him. That said, I purchased this book on a whim and ended up spending several days of a vacation reading it with the same excitement as I would a good novel. The writing is fantastic and the arguments provocative.

Many education researchers live with a sense that our work is not taken quite seriously as other fields in the academy (such as physics or medicine). Comparing schools of education to other professional schools in law and medicine, Labaree presents a convincing essay on the origins and reasons for the low status of the education school. The chapter on the romance with progressivism was especially interesting to me. As previously stated, the quality of writing is as good as it gets, with arguments likely to make you think and a nice balance between progressive and conservative thinkers.

What a wonderful book! It helps one to explore the identity of a good teacher - a truly valuable focus for professional development in any type of school. The authors explore the characteristics of a "good teacher" including ethics, patience, love of learning, and - imagine! - pleasure! That is, one should only be a teacher if one enjoys teaching! Wish a few of my teachers had considered that notion. If you are a "born teacher," this book will affirm you and remind you of why you do it!

As a future teacher, I found this book to be an interesting and informative guide to succesful teaching. The sections and suheads were extremely effective in breaking out key capabilities. The Authority and Order chapters were especially enlightening. Downsides: The dialogue under each subhead was often crammed with so many thoughts it was difficult to determine the key messages. Redundancy was running wild across all chapters. Overall: Good key points, if you can uncover them.

Having cataloged the personal, moral and intellectual qualities of great teachers, the authors of 'The Elements of Teaching' acknowledge that many readers 'may be wondering by now whether achieving these standards is not beyond the reach of all but the rarest paragon.' And yet most teachers, myself included, entered the profession with the goal of becoming just such a rare paragon. In reading this entertaining and well-written work (the opening paragraph to the chapter entitled Learning is exquisite)I feel I gained a better apppreciation of how my personal idiosyncracies enhance my effectiveness as an educator, and at times detract from it. Likewise, this book reinforced to me how fine the deviding line is between exemplary and egregious teacherly conduct. A very worthwhile read - warmly recommended.

This is a golden little book that all teachers should read. It would be very useful also for those administrators who look at teachers as no more than talking machines, only needed to cover as many classes as possible.
The Authors are both educators and administrators. They know wery well what they are talking about, and, under an apparently old fashioned way of writing, they offer a very modern way to look at teaching, a mission as old as the human species, that evolved and continously evolves according to the social development.
The list of the basic elements-authority, ethics, imagination, patience, ...-is long, and all of the entries are analyzed in depth, using appropriate examples. Anyhow, the volume is no cookbook. Although it gives prescriptions and examples, these are intended to be internalized, not to be used as such. They are just a starting point for a personal elaboration.
When the book is finished, the reader is forced to reappraise his teaching methodology, and I imagine that he will also enjoy reading the companion book by the same Authors: The Elements of Learning.

I recommend this book to new teachers, administrators, parents, anyone who gives a hoot about educating children in this country. Written simply with terrific examples, it should be required reading for educators. This is a serious work of writing, but when you are finished, it will be well worth the time. The writing is calm and well thought out. There is nothing hysterical or pleading in this book. Just good old common sense with a touch of experience thrown in to make the points all the more convincing. The chapter on a teacher's authority in the classroom, and how most teachers abuse that authority, is very revealing. The book can be easily read in a single evening (unless you have kids of your own, but that's another story!).

This is a great overview of the National Writing Project. It's helpful for those involved in planning summer institutes and other events at their local Writing Project sites, but also inspirational to any teacher.

The following quote gives a fair summary of this wonderful book's goal: "Within such a community [as proposed in the book] we hope that debate among those with varying and competing views concerning standards of proficiency, curriculuar designs, pedagogical styles, and assessment methods will evolve into a discourse that is based _less_on_ideology_and_more_on_evidence_."

It should be clear from the title of this book that its brief 93 pages would be about mathematical proficiency for all students. Further, its subtitle would lead us to believe it will develop this through a proposal for a research and development program within mathematics education. In the first few pages, it becomes perfectly clear that the Research and Development Program the authors are suggesting doesn't vary much from the R&D Programs that private sector businesses are continually running.

At first, you'll wonder why this book was ever written. Haven't we been doing research about mathematics education for as long as we've been educating students about mathematics? The answer is a quiet "not really." To be exact, this book is revolutionary because it considers a program that would bring real, scientific data about mathematics education to educators in a meaningful way.

By focusing a realistically considered budget, the author proposes a program researching three key areas: The development and use of teachers' mathematical knowledge, teaching and learning mathematical practices, and teaching and learning algebra in kindergarten through 12th grade. The proposed program would focus its energy on these three areas and develop useful theories, curricula, and materials over the course of a 10-15 year period. At the end of this time, the group would have developed all of the knowledge necessary to help all teachers teach algebra effectively to all students.

This book is absolutely wonderful. The book is only a blueprint for this program, and hence doesn't offer solutions. Rather it provides an extremely well thought out path to reach these solutions. I would highly recommend it to anyone in the field of mathematics education, as we should all hope that this will be the future of mathematics education.

One of the best books I have read on teaching in the church! Sara provides so many creative ideas to help any teacher, no matter how long they have taught, not matter what age they teach. Just reading the book, with her teaching ideas, encourages me to be a more effective teacher. Her book isn't a book you will read one time and put it on the shelf. You will read it and use it constantly! I am using many of her ideas as I train Peruvian nationals in a Bible Institute. I hope that they will not only learn about teaching but they will learn how to teach as they observe me using many of the ideas for hands-on leanring, getting the students involved and thinking about the Bible, not just sitting and listening!