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Title: The Teaching Gap: Best Ideas from the World's Teachers for Improving Education in the Classroom by James W. Stigler, James Hiebert ISBN: 0-684-85274-8 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: obstacles to the recommended reform
Comment: The Teaching Gap is an easy read about an important educational issue. The insights that come from the cross-cultural studies in this book should become part of the understanding of all U.S. educators and supporters of education. If I could establish Japanese-style lesson study in every school in the country I would do it, because I believe it will improve educational practice in just the way the authors say it will.
But, The Teaching Gap has hard messages for those who hope to reform American education. One is that improvements cannot be expected to take hold quickly. Even a ten-year time frame would be too short. The arguments that support this proposition are compelling-that the superior system of the Japanese has taken 50 years to develop; that the history of short-term reform in the U.S. is replete with failures. Another hard message is that improvements have to be realized by ordinary classroom teachers--who essentially have to fix their own work--rather than be fixed by the vast army of experts who currently claim dibs on school reform.
The authors argue that Americans have to shift their thinking from fixing teachers, to fixing teaching. They ground this view on their belief that teaching is a cultural activity, based on the norms and expectations of the society in which it is found. Their cross-cultural research shows that differences in teaching between cultures are much greater than differences in teaching within a given culture. Such a finding might, for example, lead one to conclude that the controversies that rage back and forth within American education should be likened to arguing about the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. The education reform industry is not likely to appreciate these conclusions.
Stigler and Heibert's message is not going to be easy for politicians and the public to accept, either. It will have to triumph over the xenophobia in American culture that makes it hard for us to look honestly at the achievements of other countries, and the chauvinism in society that makes people all too ready to denigrate the efforts of a workforce that is 75% female. Twenty-five years of trash-talk about teachers will not be easily forgotten.
However, if the authors are correct in their assessment of what it will take to improve instruction, (and I think they are, based on 33 years of teaching and administrative experience), some means will have to be found to put teachers in charge of their own destinies. The authors feel that the education establishment can make the changes that are needed. Maybe so, but I would take another course and get outside of the establishment through some of the proposals that are coming out of the school choice movement, like charter schools. In that direction lies the freedom teachers need to improve their instruction--to march, for a change, to the sound of their own drums.
Rating: 4
Summary: Teaching in different cultures
Comment: This book reports the findings of a study of Mathematics classes in Japan, Germany, and the United States. Many lessons were videotaped in each country, and then analyzed by the researchers. I'm an English teacher but I still found the researcher's observations to be intriguing. After describing the general characteristics of classes in each country, the researchers focus on Japan and the way that educators there collaborate. The way the Japanese teachers collaborate very intensively and the Japanese attitude toward educational reform were pointed out to show how Japan has managed to greatly improve its educational system in the last 50 years while the US system has gone through reform after reform without seeming to achieve any results. Differences in the Japanese culture that have added to this success are pointed out, and reasons for these differences are discussed. As an experienced teacher in the US, who has also lived in Japan and taught Japanese students in America, I believe that their observations were very accurate, and don't bode well for the success of educational reform in America in the future. However, I think that every teacher who is truly interested in school reform should read this book. (And unlike many books about education, it is very readable-- no pretension jargon, or murky tangled sentence structure.)
Rating: 4
Summary: Interesting for a Education Student
Comment: I am in a program to become a High School math teacher. Our professor recommended this book. I found it to be pretty interesting. The authors do a detailed analysis of a video study from the TIMSS study. Their analysis compares how math is taught in the US, Germany and Japan. Their conclusion is that the US approach focuses on teaching terms and procedures where as the other countries emphasize understanding concepts. They go onto to propose a system of "lesson planning" to improve teaching in the US. Lesson planning calls for teachers to work in teams and develop a single lesson plan (maybe one per semester). The process of developing the lesson plan and refining it imparts to the teachers involved a kind of "best practices" that they can then use in their everyday planning. I am not sure if this is practical, but it sure sounds reasonable to me.
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