"Grauer’s writing reminds “us that Great Teaching, singular, rare, unusual, is something that should be sought after and found. Thank you.”
—Richard Dreyfuss, Actor
Oxford scholar,
founder of The Dreyfuss Initiative
“Fearless Teaching is the rare book about education that is both beautiful and critically relevant. With a command of language, story telling, observation, and insight that is all but extinct in non-fiction,
Grauer weaves a vivid tapestry where the warp is ‘how we learn best’ and the waft is ‘the soul of the true teacher’. A book that belongs on the shelf of all who are custodians of our youth, to remind us of why we teach and justhow powerful the transformation of learning can be.”
—Grant Lichtman, Senior Fellow,
The Martin Institute for Teaching Excellence
Photo Credit: Sophie Oller
An excerpt from the Fearless Teaching story entitled: Too Nice a Day to Stay Inside
...Early in my career, I used to think, “Keep them busy” and “We only have a few periods a day” and “Those parents expect their kids to get instruction every minute.” But now, decades later, after thousands of hours spent with teens and their teachers, I don’t think that way anymore. Besides, brain research shows that a break of about four minutes every 20 minutes or so tends to allow for maximum mental efficiency.
“Neuroscientists, developmental biologists, psychologists, social scientists, and researchers from every point of the scientific compass now know that play is a profound biological process,” said Stuart Brown of Stanford, whose home office happens to be a treehouse. But must it really take neuroscientists to understand the obvious, explained around the year 400 B.C.by Plato: “Do not then train youths by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds so that you maybe better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.” I wish I’d understood all that my first year teaching middle school back in the 70s, back when I obsessed on my curriculum but not on my students’ learning needs.
. . . On one side of the field seven boys were weaving in and out of each other, further apart, then back again, several of them moving up the bank of a hill, roving like a pack. I had spent time observing wild horses up in South Dakota, and these boys’ movements reminded me of those majestic animals. On the other side of the field, five girls gradually moved under the shade of the holly oak tree forming a close circle of conversation and connection. Everyone seemed to be moving as nature intended. It was a veritable field day for gender studies. Then a boy wandered over to the group of girls, and from a distance it looked like they could have been talking in sign language since they used so many hand gestures . . .