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Yero, Judith Lloyd.
(2002). Teaching in Mind: How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education.
Hamilton, Montana: Mind-Flight Publishing.
Pp. xii +
276.
$18.95 (paper) ISBN
0-9711983-3-0.
Reviewed by Samantha
B. Caughlan
University of
Wisconsin, Madison
June 15,
2002
Judith Lloyd
Yero is a teacher-turned-inservice-provider with years of
experience leading workshops on brain research and its
application to teaching and learning. In Teaching in Mind:
How Teacher Thinking Shapes Education, she turns her
knowledge of cognitive processes to the problem of how teachers'
thinking determines what happens in classrooms. She contends
that once teachers become aware of their own beliefs and how
these influence their classroom practice, they will be able and
willing to take charge of their own thought processes and become
capable of transforming education. In the course of her
exhortation, she reveals her own political and pedagogical
leanings. Firmly opposed to "traditional" pedagogy as damaging
to students, she attacks its presuppositions as flawed,
presenting a progressive model of teaching based on neuro-science
and selectionism as the research-based ideal.
The book is
designed to support the individual reader in the exploration of
her own beliefs and thought processes. The first couple of
chapters are intended to convince teachers that their beliefs and
values are a powerful force in the classroom. The middle
chapters look at metaphors, beliefs, and mental images commonly
held by educators, and their consequences for teaching. Teachers
are invited to explore their own inner landscape, using an
appendix designed to lead teachers through a self-inventory of
attitudes, beliefs, and habits for their own reflection. The
remaining chapters examine conventional beliefs and assumptions
underlying both traditional and "reform" educational agendas, and
show how recent research and a systems approach to education
provide more productive tools for thought. Yero ends by urging
teachers to develop and put in place their own educational
vision.
There is
little to disagree with in her basic premise, which is that
teachers, as those who implement curriculum, are largely
responsible for what happens in classrooms, and that teacher
thinking thus impacts what takes place there. It is doubtless a
good thing for teachers to reflect on their own presuppositions
and bring their teaching in line with their own ideals. However,
in her failure to define her terms and examine her own
assumptions, she presents a rather fragmented and contradictory
account of how her recommendations would change education for the
better.
Yero does a
good job of raising awareness of how thoughts and beliefs
influence action, as well as how they often contradict each
other. She continually encourages the reader to examine his own
beliefs against his own practice. What constitutes a good
learning environment, silence or the productive noise of
simultaneous inquiry? How does a teacher's interest in student
curiosity and freedom of expression stand up against the felt
need to control the classroom environment? She illustrates her
discussion with many examples.
Chapters
three, four and five provide a thorough and readable discussion
of the origins and uses of metaphor (heavily influenced by Lakoff
and Johnson's work), and of the consequences of metaphorical
entailments. She is obviously well-read in both the theoretical
discussion and the empirical research on commonly-held metaphors
of education. Much of this research has been done with beginning
teachers, and preservice teachers are often asked to define
and/or create their own metaphors in the service of reflection
and self-definition (e.g. Gere, et al. 1992; Bullough and Stokes
1994), but Yero offers these tools to established teachers, as
she urges them to transform their classrooms into their imagined
ideal classrooms. However, her account of how this works borders
on the magical, as when she suggests that one can easily take on
new metaphors and suddenly understand students' thought
processes, or see the world from an opposing point of
view.
Chapter 9,
"Visions of Education," and chapter 10, "Beliefs About Education,
Knowledge, and Understanding," are also quite good, confronting
the reader with thought-provoking questions and juxtaposing
different purposes of and ideas about education. Chapter 9
offers readers the opportunity of defining their own vision of
effective education. Ten asks readers to find and evaluate their
own presuppositions about topics central to education, and to
attempt to link the classroom activities they implement to the
purposes they espouse, always a valuable exercise.
I give a
mixed review to the "Self-Inventory" she provides for teachers.
I completed it and found portions interesting, and it prompted me
to refine my thinking on a couple of issues I had not confronted
recently, but it was too fragmented, composed of separate
sections calling for agreement or disagreement,
finish-the-statement exercises, and short writings. I believe
this was partly purposeful, as she invites the reader to pick and
choose and modify at will. However, the sections do not build on
each other.
While Yero
considers it a strength of her book that she draws on a number of
disciplines(cognitive psychology, management, linguistics,
teacher education, philosophy, curriculum studies), the result is
a real confusion in her terminology. Ironically, she criticizes
"traditional" educators for not considering their language and
its entailments adequately, yet she herself fails to define words
she uses early and often, assuming the reader will know what she
means without further explanation. It was chapter 12 before it
became absolutely clear that she was limiting her use of the term
"reform" to state-sponsored, standards-based reform. "Research"
appears to refer to any research that supports her stances on
pedagogy and testing: "Dozens of scientific studies have
demonstrated that traditional teaching is at best only marginally
effective and at worst damaging to students" (115). What does
she mean by "traditional?" "Scientific?" And research can be
found to "support" almost any teaching methods.
In her chapter on
"Beliefs, Values and Worldviews," she defines belief in several
different ways: as a generalization about the world we make from
our experience; as something that we use to give meaning to
experience (what comes first, the experience or the
generalization?). Beliefs are defined in opposition to fact,
which is defined on page 20 as a "statement that from a
particular perspective is part of 'consensus' reality"
(italics in the original), but is presented as something that is
consistently true on pages 22 and 23. Her discussion of
worldviews does not sufficiently differentiate them from
beliefs.
Part of the
confusion here may stem from her strong individualistic stance,
which results in her almost ignoring the sociocultural nature of
shared beliefs and knowledge: "Society is a group of individual
people" (29; italics in the original). As each of these
people has had unique experiences, each has a different
constellation of beliefs, and a different mode of cognitive
functioning. The only ethical approach to teaching is to confront
each pupil as a unique individual. Any attempt to draw
generalizations or categorize is "the monster of group-think"
(209). This makes it actually harder to carry out her campaign --
she doesn't consider that differences between teachers or between
teacher and student may arise from cultural, and not cognitive
differences (Heath 1983, Gee 1996). She overlooks the importance
of the social in both the persistence of conventional wisdom that
she attributes to a sheep-like resistance to thought, and in the
consensus she claims among researchers on teaching.
This focus
on the individual is supported by her interpretation of brain
research, where she uses what is known about brain activity on
the molecular level to justify a view of human beings whose
differences from other individuals are more salient than their
shared practices and beliefs (Chapter 11). In this account, the
social environment can not be experienced by any two people
identically, as each collection of ten billion neurons is wired
differently. As a result, in spite of her admission that the
brain looks for patterns in the environment, Yero considers it
irresponsible in educators to look for similarities in students'
beliefs, behaviors, or mental processes which might be due to
social or cultural influences.
Looking at
Yero's book from a socioculural perspective also calls into
question her assumptions regarding the transformative power of
individual reflection. Can anyone redesign her own mental
landscape, choose her own metaphors, and erase contradictions,
standing outside her context and history? Yero does not: she is
asking teachers to buy into an alternative set of
culturally-constructed models of "good teaching" which is growing
out of the needs of the global economy and fast-capitalism (Gee,
et al 1996). In the later chapters in the book it becomes
increasingly clear that she assumes that teachers who do a
self-inventory of beliefs, and critically examine their practice
in light of those beliefs, will choose her vision of the ideal
educational system, an ideal largely defined here by
counter-examples of bad, "traditional" teaching. It is this
assumption which accounts for her vagueness regarding how a
disparate group of reflective individuals will transform
education by reflecting on and enacting their
individuality.
The rather
disjointed experience of reading this book is enhanced by Yero's
over-use of quotations. They appear at the head of every chapter
and most sub-chapters, as well as forming a significant
proportion of the text. She takes them from a wide variety of
sources, ranging from educational theorists and researchers, to
New Capitalist gurus, to quotes which appear to come from
Bartlett's. An estimation that 25% of this book consists
of material quoted from elsewhere would be a conservative one.
Much of this material could have been paraphrased. Some of the
quotations are vaguely profound, and suitable for a wide variety
of situations: "We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of
the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the
light.'' Plato (135); "A weed is just a plant whose virtues have
not yet been discovered." Ralph Waldo Emerson (124). For this
reader, this overuse takes away from those moments when the
quotation is the right word at the right moment, for example, at
the beginning of her section on the purpose of education, where
the chosen excerpts illuminate the extent to which intelligent
people differ in their opinions (166-167).
This is an
area where Ms. Yero could have used a good editor. Teaching
in Mind is obviously a self-published book: a visit to the
publisher's website offers no other publications, but a link to
the organization which handles Yero's workshops.
Unfortunately, the book concludes on its weaknesses, not on its
strengths. Submerged in a pastiche of quotes and applicable
anecdotes, and clothed in a mixture of metaphors, Yero's call to
action relies on her assumption that if enough individual
teachers examine themselves and bring their teaching in line with
their (her) ideals, they will not only effectively impact the
students assigned to their rooms, but education as an endeavor.
I second Yero's call for educators to critically examine the
metaphors and models which structure thinking and acting in
education in the context of a changing world, but we have to do
it as members of a profession coming from a diversity of
cultures, and we have to keep the political and social causes and
consequences in mind as we do so.
References
Bullough, R.V. Jr. with
D.K.Stokes. (1994, Spring) Analyzing personal teaching metaphors
in preservice teacher education as a means for encouraging
professional development. American Educational Research
Journal Vol. 31, No. 1, 197-224.
Gee, J. P. (1996)
Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses,
2nd edn. London: Taylor and Francis.
Gee, J. P., G. Hull, and
C. Lankshear. (1996) The New Work Order: Behind the Language
of the New Capitalism. Sydney and Boulder, CO: Allen and
Unwin and Westview Press.
Gere, A. R., C.
Fairbanks, A. Howes, L. Roop, D. Schaafsma. (1992) Language
and Reflection: An Integrated Approach to Teaching English.
New York: Macmillan.
Heath, S. B. (1983)
Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and
Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
About the Reviewer
Samantha B. Caughlan is
a doctoral student in Curriculum and Instruction at the
University of Wisconsin/Madison and a facilitator in the
Partnership for Literacy at the Center on English Learning and
Achievement. Her research interests include New Literacy
Studies, critical discourse analysis, cultural models of English,
and the integration of technology in schools.
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