Teacher\'s Craft Normand and Kohn\'s (2011) Review

Teacher's Craft

Normand and Kohn's (2011) review of Paul Chance's book The Teacher's Craft: The Ten Essential Skills of Effective Teaching, notes that most of what the author presented in the book was an "invaluable" reminder of useful strategies of which they were already familiar. The strength of this book is manner in which it links these strategies together in one resource.

Chance presents insights into how to manage behaviors and maximize conditions to facilitate student success. He defines teaching as creating activities that "improves rate, durability and transfer of learning" and explains each element and its significance. The book recommends teachers incorporate strategies to improve classroom behavior and self-esteem. For instance teachers should present classroom behavioral objectives in terms of the positive as opposed to the negative. In others words what to do instead of what not to do. The emphasis should be on positive rather than negative comments. This simple everyday behavior in the classroom helps to set the feeling tone of the classroom.

The book also endorses deliberate, repetitive practice to improve performance, transfer, and retention, and remarks on the benefits of immediate feedback that is concise, to the point, and public to facilitate achievement. Motivation, according to Chance, is extrinsic and under the control of the teacher. This perspective places responsibility of student progress squarely on the shoulders of the teacher. Student success is dependent on good teaching and the establishment of an environment that is contusive to learning. The article sites Chance's review of various token economies to motivate students at different level, this strategy's, strengths and weaknesses, and how they commonly fail. This strategy is based on operant conditioning to modify behavior. How students learn is connected to opportunities instructors provide for practice and the attainment of specific skills. This is emphasized over genetics or intrinsic abilities. The implication is that given the right environment all students can learn.

Normand and Kohn did criticize the lack of empirical research on some of the strategies suggested in the book on how to teach and suggested that although there is intuitive support many of these activities they have not been thoroughly tested and may lack reliability. However, they did concede that compared to most books in this genre, the teaching methods put forth did contain strong references to relevant research.