by Patrice Palmer ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 15, 2017
An efficient guide to teaching teamwork skills to pupils.
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A debut book offers activities that promote student collaboration.
Group work can be a way to get students to take a more active role in their own educations, but how do you teach them to successfully act as a team? With this book, Palmer aims to provide strategies that foster cooperation among students: “It is designed for teachers in any subject area who want to use group projects in their classroom and want to prepare their students to work effectively in teams.” Palmer recommends educators try one or all of these 13 activities before assigning pupils a group project. The exercises cover fundamentals like how students can get to know one another, assign roles, resolve conflicts, and build consensus. They also involve less obvious tactics, like journal writing as a means of evaluating the group’s progress and “tower building” to encourage pupils to rely on one another. Each activity is formatted like a recipe, listing the time it will take, the materials involved, and the team-building skill it will attempt to teach. For example, the skill for the activity “Word Lists” is “plan, design, or carry out a project or task from start to finish.” In “Word Lists,” each student is asked to memorize as many words on a list as possible, repeating those that they can remember. Then the students are put into teams to complete the same task, with planning time beforehand to strategize how best to memorize the words as a group. Ideally, the teams of students should be able to collectively memorize a greater number of the words than they could as individuals. Each activity concludes with useful “Debriefing Questions” that ask the pupils to think back on the exercise and share their opinions of it: “What were the advantages and disadvantages of working on your own and as part of a team?” Palmer’s background is in teaching ESL/EFL and TESL, and she bases these activities on teamwork skills identified by the Conference Board of Canada. She writes in a simple, directional prose that keeps her instructions concise and unadorned. Each step of the way, she explains the reasoning behind the activity and how it relates to the process of team-building. She generally offers examples or templates for all of her recommendations, from journal-writing prompts to self-evaluation sheets. The book itself is slim—more manual than pedagogical treatise—fitting all 13 of the exercises into 62 pages. If it feels like a crash course, that’s by design: these team skills are meant to be taught as a precursor to group work, so it makes sense to try to get them out of the way within a day or two. The guide makes it simple to read, prepare for, and enact such exercises quickly and easily. Palmer recommends a regimen of all 13—each is designed around a separate skill, after all—but walking through even one of them with students will surely create a more fertile environment for subsequent group work.
An efficient guide to teaching teamwork skills to pupils.Pub Date: July 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9977628-4-6
Page Count: 62
Publisher: Alphabet Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Thomas Sowell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 4, 1993
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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by C.S. Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 8, 1947
The sub-title of this book is "Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools." But one finds in it little about education, and less about the teaching of English. Nor is this volume a defense of the Christian faith similar to other books from the pen of C. S. Lewis. The three lectures comprising the book are rather rambling talks about life and literature and philosophy. Those who have come to expect from Lewis penetrating satire and a subtle sense of humor, used to buttress a real Christian faith, will be disappointed.
Pub Date: April 8, 1947
ISBN: 1609421477
Page Count: -
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1947
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