Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series)

"[Brookfield] gently demystifies critically reflective learning and teaching with dozens of practical examples from the classroom in different scholarly fields. Lucid, wise, jargon-free, personal and fluently written. Required reading for educators of adults everywhere and for all faculty development programs."
-- Jack Mezirow, emeritus professor of adult education, Teachers College, Columbia University

Building on the insights of his highly acclaimed earlier work, The Skillful Teacher, and applying the principles of adult learning, Brookfield thoughtfully guides teachers through the processes of becoming critically reflective about teaching, confronting the contradictions involved in creating democratic classrooms, and using critical reflection as a tool for ongoing personal and professional development.

A more fundamental objection that can be levelled against this book -- and others of its ilk -- is related to the question: what does "critical reflection" mean? The premise of the book is that the idea of "critical reflection" can exist without context in, or reference to, a specific recognised discipline (such as, for instance, history or physics). This is absurd; the craft of teaching takes place within the context of a specific discipline with its own methods and problems; teaching itself is not a discipline, no matter how much professors of education may protest otherwise. This attempt to treat the craft of teaching as a discipline ("education"), and to describe "critical reflection" within this pseudo-discipline, is the primary reason why the book lacks any substance whatsoever. There is simply nothing to talk about; "critical reflection" is a bogus notion, both in the abstract and with regard to "education"; hence the vacuous talk of "lenses", "autobiographies", and "critical conversations".

To provide some further elaboration of the vacuity of the notion of context-free "critical-thinking" -- and as such, intimately related to the discussion in the previous paragraph -- the problem is we cannot teach "critical thinking", because there is no such thing. There are areas of study such as mathematics and geography. Each has its own ideas, problems and epistemology. The overlap, such as may exist, belongs to philosophy -- metaphysics and epistemology, where we treat problems in the most abstract setting possible -- and hope to say something useful in the more concrete settings they emerged from. There is no "critical thinking" that applies to all, or even most, disciplines. The kind of thinking mathematics requires will be quite distinct from that which history may require. The only things we can say about thinking *in general* are superficial, misleading and platitudinous. These professional educators need a more rigorous schooling in the history and development of ideas.

Those training to become teachers are not (truth be told) the brightest people around. Unfortunately, drivel like this will leave them even more confounded than before.

The decent books on the craft of teaching remain Highet's "The Art of Teaching, James' "Talks to Teachers", and Barzun's "Begin Here". I warmly recommend them.