Product reviews for The Expert Teacher

The Expert Teacher is a book that was six years in the making. What was Darren Mead up to in that time you ask? What Darren has done is teach. Teach hundreds of students, work with numerous colleagues and hone his craft and his understanding to the point where he, like very few others, can genuinely claim the title of expert teacher.

Rather than riding the wave of an ideology, or flip-flopping between standpoints depending on whether or not it secured a spot at the popular conferences of the day, Darren incorporates into this book a wide range of ideas, strategies and teaching approaches which make it abundantly clear that a search for -˜the' way to teach or the ultimate solution that can be neatly packaged will always be a futile one.

It is evident that Darren is a thinker as well as a teacher, and this thinking and exploration of ideas leads to a considered and rational approach to all of the approaches discussed in the book. And crucially it is in the classroom that these ideas have proven their worth. As well as his own classroom, Darren has supported the development of teaching in a number of contexts - meaning that the approaches shared and explained here have a genuine track record of application and success with real students, in real classrooms, in real schools and over a long period of time. In education of late we seem to have become stuck in a cycle of build 'em up and knock 'em down, with ideas such as growth mindset championed by large numbers of people only for them to be ridiculed shortly after. And often by the very same voices. In this book, however, are ideas that have been used over time and reviewed and renewed as and when it was clear that to do so would have a clear and genuine impact on students' learning.

Another real strength of The Expert Teacher is its accessibility. Developing educators can often find the language of educational writing a barrier to the ideas being expressed and be turned off; here, however, we have a book written by someone who has no desire to show us how clever they are or to stray into academia at the expense of classroom practice. Darren Mead is able to encapsulate a number of ideas that cross dichotomies and manages to bring them together in a straightforward, insightful and, ultimately, readable way.

I've not experienced what Darren refers to as his -˜terrible' guitar playing, but if this book is even a slight indication of the way that he approaches his work in the classroom then I have no doubts that he is very much an expert teacher.