There are two things to think about when reading this book: how does a school’s faculty capitalize on group genius to transform mediocre education into world-class learning? And, how to we help children and teens learn to work in groups so that they learn how to stand on one another’s shoulders to solve the problems they are asked to solve? Yes, this author takes us into the world of music, business and innovation, but we can use the seven principles of effective and innovative groups to design learning experiences, particularly with web 2.0 tools to inroduce learners to the power of creative collaboration.

What kind of education is going to push our students into a world-class position? Kareten is convinced that a very tightly controlled direct-teaching style with some attention paid to differentiation and advanced learning is the answer. The lecture and the textbook with a few resources assembled by the teacher from “somewhere” is the central focus. Ur question is: with very tightly controlled strategies at work, what kind of student in what settings will succeed beyond the basics? The author has the bulk of her experience in the special education classroom. Thus the focus on small incremental and directed work. No branching out into the library or the community or the Internet here. No cultivation of student native interests. It is all business in learning an exact and prescribed curriculum.  Much to narrow for our tastes and this style of teaching tends to encouraging the locking of the classroom door to all specialists including teacher librarians. Not recommended.

Imagine yourself as a teacher librarian in a major professional development effort with teachers who are developing learning units specifically targeted at kids who usually don’t do very well in the classroom and subjecting your teaching methods to action research so that you are really focusing on strategies and their impact on learning. For a couple of years, we have been encouraging teacher librarians to partner in such projects and report their success right at the learner level at: http://www.seedwiki.com/wiki/lmc_action_research/   As we read through these excellent self-examinations of one’s own teaching collected from ten teachers in the Madison WI school district, we marvel at what a difference can be made when teachers take the time to focus on learning outcomes. Yet, the teacher librarian is nowhere in sight even though we are confident that there are strong teacher librarians in the Madison schools. We recommend that a group of teacher librarians use this book to read and discuss any of the case studies presented here. Then imagine together what would happen to these same learning experiences if you were collaborating along side the teacher in such action research studies of what quality teaching and learning looks like. What would a collection of published case studies look like in your school or district? What would both teachers and teacher librarians learn as a result of such a project? As a reviewer, I predict that the profession of teacher librarians would be healthy indeed if such publishing happened. Anyone up to the challenge? And, to get started, read and share the stories in this book.

With the emphasis on using research-based practices during teacher, these authors have assembled 24 teaching strategies that are supported by numerous research studies. Using these techniques, a teacher and an evaluator could assess the quality of a lesson where each of the strategies are attempted by the teacher. The idea is, the more of these strategies are present, the higher quality the lesson is. It is instructive to run down this list of research-based strategies in light of NCLB requirements that teaching practices be founded in research. Here they are: taking student readiness into account; defining instructional expectations; providing instructional evaluation; providing corrective instruction; keeping students on task; maximizing teaching time; providing ample learning time; providing transfer of learning instruction; providing decision-making instruction; improving prediction and problem-solving instruction; providing contiguity; utilizing repetition effectively; utilizing unifiers; providing one-to-one tutoring; utilizing reminders; utilizing teamwork; utilizing question and answer; reducing teacher-pupil ratio to under 21 to 1; clarifying communication; utilizing computerized instruction; utilizing demonstrations; controlling classroom dispositions, preschool instruction;  and, enlisting student motivation.  The authors provide a multiple choice test in the instructor’s manual to test whether the teacher understands each strategy and also the observational checklist to see if these strategies are being used effectively during an actual lesson. It is a very interesting approach to begin with a body of research and then construct a method of teaching. Such an approach covers the science of teaching, but where is the creativity? Do great teachers employ such a model as they approach their students? Of interest to school librarians is the author’s encouragement that observing the teaching of a “research paper” provides an observer with a great opportunity to see if all the above strategies are being incorporated. If you want a chuckle, read this list of steps a teacher should take to teach the research process. Obviously, the authors have not heard of plagiarism, libraries, information literacy, quality information, web 2.0, or any of a number of problems, possibilities, and challenges of research. Back to school it is for our authors to discover the holes. Perhaps this is the problem with the entire set. While strategies supported by research are very informative, if followed slavishly, they produce what kids term “boring” instruction – direct teaching that lacks spark, creativity, interest, involvement, and, yes, even higher level thinking. So, as a foundational set of elements, this collection is instructive, but this reviewer hopes that no school would set these “standards” as the only set of strategies to be evaluated.  Recommended as a beginning list of researched strategies but Marzano does a better job in his What Works series of researched teaching methods.

Robert J. Marzano

(ASCD, 2007, 219 p. $_____. ISBN: 978-1-4166-0571-3)

We are usually enthusiastic of Marzano’s work because in the last decade, he has written the excellent What Works series that have made majore contributions to the literature. This is not one of those titles. Chapters in this book cover the design of instruction from goals and objectives through assessment backed up by research. The problem is that the research is old, most being in the 80s and early 90s before NCLB and its philosophy came into being. We’d like to see a major review of research in the last decade. So, regretfully, we recommend other works by Marzano and are still waiting for something really current.