Interviews with elementary school, high school, prep school, and university teachers document their approaches to teaching

Twenty Teachers

Education & Teaching

MacRorie, Ken

Schools & Teaching

Oxford University Press

The rare and exceptional teacher--one who could teach absolutely anything to anybody--is what Ken Macrorie set out to find among teachers of many different subjects at many different levels. The result of his search is 20 Teachers, a collection of revealing profiles in which outstanding educators explain what works for them in the classroom and why. Macrorie's interviews with these professionals show an astonishing similarity in their beliefs, methods, and attitudes and the keys to their success with students from first grade to the graduate level. Ranging from a woodworking instructor in a wealthy suburban school to an inner-city history teacher to a professor of space engineering, the teachers profiled here share a fundamental belief in putting choice and responsibility in the hands of their students, no matter what their age. Macrorie includes, in addition to the interviews, a summary chapter listing 43 items these teachers claim help learners to do "good works." Finally, in an "Open Letter About Schools," he explores the notion that schools have developed, often unwittingly, traditions that run counter to the way these educators work; he discusses the obstacles they face, from both within the system and without. Twenty Teachers offers insights that will enable others to inspire learning in their students and voices a new and challenging view of today's educational system.

Science & Math

Mathematics

Telling Writing

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

Hayden Book Co.

Condemning both the use of computerized grading and the liberal facade of college faculty, an English professor proposes a new approach to foster creative writing

Uptaught

Children's Books

Boynton/Cook Pub

A Vulnerable Teacher

Why is Telling Writing, now in its fourth edition, still going strong in hundreds of colleges and universities? Ken Macrorie touches on the answer in his preface: "Good teaching in any field isn't a matter of employing gimmicks and choosing from a damnfool encyclopedia of tricks to play on students . . . but a matter of setting up a climate friendly to learning and then challenging learners to connect their experience and ideas with those of the accepted authorities or producers. Students can't become truly educated unless they grow out of and beyond themselves . . . Telling Writing gives them an indispensable base, a knowledge of themselves on which to grow." Macrorie's approach works because it helps students break away from the deadly academic prose fostered by so many writing courses and enables them to write about and from their own experiences.

Telling writing (Hayden English language series)

In this video, Macrorie leads teachers from a number of disciplines in a workshop that demonstrates how searching writing is a way of thinking and learning.

Searching writing: A contextbook (Hayden writing series)

Literature & Fiction

Writing to Be Read is the high school version of Telling Writing. This third edition reaffirms Ken Macrorie's continuing commitment to young writers, as well as the perennial popularity of Writing to Be Read. Like all fine teachers, Macrorie has remained a student of his subject, and this book is informed by fresh classroom discoveries. The book embodies a carefully articulated writing course that gives students the freedom to find their voices and let their subjects find them.

Writing to Be Read

Words, Language & Grammar

Heinemann

Searching writing: A contextbook

Boynton/Cook

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Books by MacRorie, Ken