Product reviews for Teacher Geek

In the many and heated debates of the online educational community, the narrative is of a 'battle' between those teachers who favour direct instruction, and those who feel that children should have an element of control over their own learning. If you were to base your impressions of our education system solely on what you read online, you might imagine that there are only two types of schools: ones where children are filled up with knowledge by teachers telling them what they need to know, and ones where children are set adrift from their teachers, left to engage themselves in a freeflow mayhem of group work and self expression. Happily the truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle. (Or at least it does in the hundreds of schools that I have visited over the last decade through my work as a teacher trainer).

I loved this book. While I use quite a bit of teacher talk in my own teaching, I also regularly hand over the reins to the learners as well. And this book is positively stuffed with ideas about how to do just that. It is a pick and mix selection of all the things you can do as well as telling your learners what they need to know. I work mainly with highly motivated adults, and even when we are fully grown it is hard for us to concentrate on a teacher talking to us for long periods of time. This book does not suggest that you should never talk to your learners, but what it does do, and what it does very well, is to give you lots of alternatives for when talking is not enough, for when your children are still not 'getting it', for when your voice is broken and you are completely exhausted, or for when you just fancy trying something different. This book is about the sheer reality of being a teacher - that constant search for a way to get through to the children in your care, so that they can learn. One of the frustrations with our education system for me as a parent is that my own children often know what they are being taught already, because they are avid readers outside of school (as I tried to explain in this blog post). This book gives the teacher lots of ways to get the learners to show you what they already know, and then to play around with that knowledge in order to build independent learning skills.

The 'F Word' is out of fashion in education at the moment, or at least it is in the narrative that takes place online (that's 'F' for 'fun' by the way, rather than for anything more fruity). We are regularly reminded that sometimes learning is hard work and boring and that children need to develop the ability to persist when the going gets tough. While these things are obvious to any educator, it is also true that a diet of grit and grind starts to dull the desire to learn after a while. All work and no play makes Jackie a very dull girl indeed. 'Fun' need not be an end in itself (although I'm not entirely sure why it shouldn't be). But when we are having fun, we are more relaxed. And when we are more relaxed, we tend to learn more easily. Being playful, particularly with ideas, is a key element in developing creativity. Above all else, this book is about the playful ways in which Isabella Wallace and Leah Kirkman have inspired their learners to learn. Throughout my reading of the book, I found myself smiling in recognition at the many brilliant suggestions, or thinking about how much my children would love to learn using the techniques described. Although I've been in education for 20 years now, and I've met and shared strategies with thousands of teachers over that time, there were lots of ideas in here that were brand new to me. These are ideas that I can now pass on to other teachers, which is all part of how collaborative learning works.



As I read this book, I began to consider the different names that we use when we talk about children in the context of a school. For some, they are 'pupils', for others they are 'students', but in this book they are 'learners', and that seems entirely fitting. The focus here is less on what the teacher does, and more on what the learners do. It is worth remembering that, just because you taught something, that does not necessarily mean that your children learned it. Or, as Walter Barbee once memorably said: "If you've told a child a thousand times and he still does not understand, then it is not the child who is the slow learner."