Product reviews for The Thinking Teacher

I was recently sat at the back of a Secondary School classroom in a middle-Eastern country waiting for the lesson to start. Why was I there? I was on a fact-finding mission to inform me of what might be needed for a curriculum development project I had been commissioned to undertake. I had asked to meet key stakeholders: education ministers, funders, teacher-education college lecturers, school teachers and students. The ministry was suspicious of me wanting to go into a school -” they had asked me to write curriculum materials to a brief for teachers to -˜deliver', why would I want to consult with teachers, more so students? They relented as I had argued that it would help me create better materials if I understood the audience. So here I was and the teacher walked in to start the lesson, powered up the EWB and started by going through his intended learning out comes point by point. My heart sank, I could well have been in any classroom in England. The lesson was good in many respects, but formulaic and predictable. There isn't anything wrong with learning objectives, learning outcomes and success criteria per se, just their mechanical use often leads to uninspiring teaching and passive learning. Let's have some more thought from teachers beyond the obvious. I was thus intrigued to receive -˜The Thinking Teacher' to review.

-˜The Thinking Teacher' is not a -˜how to' book, indeed Quinlan notes that “there is no one model of a highly effective teacher, no one set of things that these people do to make things happen”. There are many good teachers who achieve good results by following a tried and tested repertoire of teaching approaches. Quinlan argues that what separates the truly great teachers from the good ones is that they truly understand learning and the different forms it can take; they spot opportunities for encouraging it in ways that they were never taught to do. These are the individuals who can adapt their teaching to the changing world that young people are in; these are the individuals that move teaching forward. These teachers think for themselves and get their pupils to think for themselves too. I could not agree more.

The book is divided into twelve chapters each exploring an aspect of schooling with intriguing titles such as “All you need is love”; “Technology as a mirror” and “Learning as becoming” but with a consistent argument: teachers should reflect on their own practice and students should think for themselves if their learning is to be deep and meaningful. In chapter two, Quinlan asks “What kind of teacher are you?” and explains that how you define yourself as a teacher is one of the most powerful areas to think through. Rehearsed are the typical tensions between progressives (characterised by Dewey as being more interested in expression, the cultivation of individuality and interacting with the world in a way that prepares young people for participation in a changing world) and traditionalists (who see education as the transmission of a body of knowledge and skills formulated in the past). Quinlan argues in his book that asking questions that we already know the answers to simply reproduces the world as it is, or was, but by asking questions that we do not know the answers to can lead to change -” either a change in how we interact with the world or about how we think about the way it works. Indeed the argument of chapter six is that replicating “best practice” is not good enough as this is a retrospective exercise, rather we should strive for “next practice” i.e. the best practice of tomorrow.

There is a thoughtful section on reflection and references to Donald Schon's concepts of -˜reflection on action' and -˜reflection in action' which are now standard as part of the curriculum in many teacher-education institutions, and most teachers are encouraged to continue learning from their practice by reflecting on it afterwards and considering how they could move forward in terms of developing students'. I also like the discussion of how much information we should supply learners to help them formulate problems and come up with solutions. There is a strong argument to give learners -˜spaces to think' and the use of silence; Quinlan writes: “Imagine what would happen if when you asked a question you met the answer with silence. The result could be similar to providing thinking time before choosing a member of the class to answer”. 

Following Mick Waters' excellent book “Thinking Allowed on Schooling” (2013) we now have another -˜must buy' book for the thinking teacher: “The Thinking Teacher”. Following the same theme, Quinlan gets the reader to move on from thinking of “learning as acquiring to learning as becoming”, in other words he is advocating a classroom based around students becoming participants in the subject rather than possessors of certain, closely defined slices of it. This shift in thinking transforms a subject from a collection of knowledge or skills to be gained, to a field of discussion, a community and a space.