Sample book summary from Helping Good Teachers Become Excellent--  Robert  Fried, author of The Passionate Teacher (Beacon Press, 2002, 318 pages), offers a realistic look at what goes on in schools, what passes for education, and what true education is. No, it’s not another diatribe about how schools are failing and teachers are worthless. It is, in fact, as the title says—”A Practical Guide.” He has no ax to grind and focuses more on what is right than  what is wrong. This is an excellent book. It articulates what many of us have found difficult to explain. He takes the mystery out of good teaching.    The book has five parts: The Passion, The Game, The Stance, The Student, and The Course. Throughout he has teachers, at both elementary and secondary levels, in their own words explain what they do in their classrooms to excite students about learning math, Spanish, science, and more. He knows that real learning takes much more than textbooks and chalkboards.  My favorite section is “The Game” in which Fried describes so accurately The Game of School, a deadly routine of textbooks, worksheets, lectures, and homework with the teacher in the spotlight as caller of all the shots. The students do the work without brain engaged in order to “earn” grades. Fried says we get “compliance instead of thoughtfulness, submissiveness instead of high quality work.”  (continued below)                              

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As he does for every point he makes, he offers a list of examples showing how teachers, students and administrators “play the game.” A few of them: “Teachers who cover the curriculum without stopping to ask if it even makes sense to kids and who give short-answer tests because it is too time-consuming to grade essay-type questions; ‘A’ students who are ready to do anything asked of them to earn that A except take risks, share their true feelings, or think for themselves; Any student who opts not to ask a question or disagree with someone else’s ideas, so as not to give the impression that he or she really cares about what’s going on; administrators who are content when students are quiet, when litter, graffiti, and fighting are reduced, and when nobody throws food in the lunchroom, regardless of how much students are actually learning.” Most of this section is composed of numerous ways teachers can change the game of school.

In the section called “The Stance” he discusses how teachers must eventually adopt what he calls a “stance.”  I would call it an unwritten mission statement that presents the teacher’s attitude toward his/her students. Fried describes it as “ created from feelings and beliefs about who these children are and how much they can produce of lasting value to themselves and society while working under our guidance.” Once the teacher figures out exactly what must be learned and engages the students in a partnership in the pursuit of it, real education starts to happen.

    Fried also discusses the fallacy of thinking that everyone can be placed along a yardstick of excellence. This belief generates labels such as “slow learner,” “average achiever,” and of course “at risk,” though he never once uses that last term. He states that such labeling has “contributed to massive rates of failure and mediocrity in our schools particularly in areas of urban and rural poverty.” He urges teachers to “work with students to discover the variety of ways that each can strive for and achieve excellence.” He recommends a grading scale of A, B. and C. with no D’s or F’s, only incompletes, giving students the opportunity to keep trying until success is reached.

    The book offers so many helpful tips it’s impossible to summarize them here. Among the jewels is a unit outline asking the teacher to determine such unusual things as “Hook Questions” to be used, how students will work together and make choices, and “Your Personal Stake – What you would say to students about why this unit is personally meaningful to you.”  The last section of the book shows teachers how to redesign a course to make it meaningful.

     I read this book about the same time I was writing a piece on strategies that work with at-risk youth, and then I discovered that the strategies I was recommending would work with all youth. Activities that not only accept but celebrate diversity, that give students the opportunity to work together making decisions and guiding their own learning, and that attach the students and their studies to the real world make learning exciting for all students.

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