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Teaching with Your Mouth Shut

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Finkel (may his soul rest in peace) outlines the joys and the difficulties of helping students connect with their most powerful and enduring teacher, themselves. I have long employed simulation and personal reflection as mediums for teaching adults, and found within this book much of the wisdom I have discovered for myself. Finkel notes that for many, their most powerful learnings have not happened in a classroom with a teacher present. Even so, we persist in creating classroom "learning" situations, just as if that were the proper medium for learning.

As another reviewer noted, these techniques might not gain immediate acceptance from students or administration. Remember, resistance IS the first stage of acceptance. For me, the tangle centers around my neediness to control how the learning will unfold battling with the student's neediness to simply be told. Since for most learning, there is (and can be) no simple "just do this" explanation, whenever I crumble under my neediness and simply tell, I steal a learning opportunity from my student. Stealing learning opportunities might not be the best use of any teacher's energies. Finkel explains how to set the stage and how to win this wrestling match with yourself. Explaining these opportunities away because of "unmotivated students" or "unsupportive administrations" merely guarantees that the neediness will win.

I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. It should be considered essential reading for anyone fool enough to pin the title of "Teacher" to their lapel. Like every competent professional, teaching requires that the practitioner understand that they cannot delight their customer by simply giving them what they want in the way they want it. True delight creeps in under the guise of novelty and surprise, as unexpected as Christmas in July. It sometimes requires that the teacher turn their mouth to the SHUT position so their student's brain can find its own ON position.

"Student-Centered learning" is the current fad in educational circles, and it's a great concept if you're fortunate enough to have students who are centered enough in their own learning to respond effectively to the great ideas presented in this book. However, way too many of us do not have the luxury of teaching at a college where, according to Finkel in the Afterword, there are "no requirements for students, no majors, and no grades." In other words, the students are there to learn, and unfortunately this isn't the case in most colleges today, especially the community colleges, where, on the average, students are consumers who view meaningful learning as a bump in the road to their success, especially when they work two full time jobs, have 17 kids, and insist upon taking 18 hours a semester.

While I enjoyed reading about Finkel's teaching strategies, I found myself wondering how all this would work with my students at a community college in South Carolina, a state with a horrendous secondary educational system, where the best and brightest leave for greener collegiate pastures in other states, and the local colleges are stuck with those passive souls who have never been required to perform and don't expect to do much of anything except to be entertained.

Don't get me wrong. Finkel has some wonderful ideas about student-centered learning, but when I have used this approach in the past, my students tended to respond negatively. On evaluations, they have said that my student-centered approach was "an excuse for not being prepared." "He needs to learn how to lecture," one of them wrote. In other words, these T.V. babies want to be spoon fed, and, although Finkel correctly argues that a great teacher "refuses to teach" in the traditional sense, the student evaluations tell the tale, and that's the tale that number-crunching administrators hear.

One of Finkel's great ideas is to write each student a letter (usually four to five paragraphs) in response to each paper that they write. If I did that, I would still be writing letters from two semesters ago, because at my college we are required to teach five classes each semester, and most of these are composition courses consisting of as many as 23 students, some of whom can barely write a sentence. In these courses there are usually six papers due each semester. Can you imagine writing 690 letters a semester? I can't. But then again, Finkel isn't teaching composition, and for that he is to be commended.

To be fair to Finkel, I must say that anyone who is foolish enough to get into the educational field and fortunate enough to teach in a place that genuinely values education over consumerism, this book is definitely for you.

Book Review: Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, By Donald L. Finkel Reviewed by Ellie Marshall, M.S., Management Core Faculty, Connecticut Valley Region, College for Lifelong Learning, Lebanon, NH.

In what situations have you learned the most? Could it be that a teacher told you what to know or did you have to discover something for yourself? Here's how to get out from between the material and your students. _Teaching With Your Mouth Shut_ should be used as a guide to letting students do the hard work of learning with you guiding more as coach, mechanic, or spotlight operator than an expert, lecturer, and insuperable role model. Students interact with each other. The teacher's prime role is to design experiences that lead to discovery of the conceptual material.

Some may doubt, but it is possible to teach this way, even in a state community college system. I have used many of these methods for years. Back in 1998 I thanked this book's author, Don Finkel, my most memorable undergraduate mentor, during my acceptance speech as I received the Distinguished Faculty Award at The College for Lifelong Learning's graduation ceremony in Durham NH. A gymnasium filled with over 150 grandparents, parents, and adult children received Associates and Bachelor degrees, cheered on by their families in the bleachers. "He had an exemplary way of modeling good, curious learning behavior both as he was teaching and teaching with a colleague." I said at the podium. Don constructed and orchestrated some of the best learning environments I have ever experienced. Sadly, I read in 1999 that Don had died of cancer, but thankfully he left his sabbatical project _Teaching With Your Mouth Shut_, published in 2000 by Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.

"So this is what he was doing," I think as I read about using original author great books and book seminars where the students do the leading and talking. Don adheres to John Dewey's conviction of education as an active and constructive process and Socrates' practice of inquiry, because "knowledge is grounded in some other process than transfer from an unimpeachable Authority"(p.35). Teaching With Your Mouth Shut describes the powerful possibilities in a classroom where the faculty deliberately keeps the authority but turns the power over to students. To supplant teaching as the act of telling, written papers, conceptual workshops, student-to-student feedback on papers, and faculty letters to students about their ideas and the writing used to convey them, fulfill the process of reflection and learning. If you strive to cross-pollinate and belong to a high caliber learning community I highly recommend _Teaching With Your Mouth Shut_. It is written for all college and graduate level teachers in the hopes that they too will join in trying to chart a journey for their students, or in Don's words, "sustain a train of thought across a transformation" (p.89). Can we really teach with our mouth shut? Given the competition in higher education today, we will benefit by this inquiry, in order to "test it, to sharpen it, and to stabilize it (p. 89)." There is even a design for a conceptual workshop in the appendix so that we might experience the mouth shut process and see for ourselves what teaching can become.

Finkel's book describes teaching techniques that he has derived from Jean Piaget's work on cognition and John Dewey's ideas about education. The ideas of "teaching with your mouth shut" are basically ways to teach without Telling. The author believes that Telling, straight lecturing to students about fact-based information, does not challenge our students to learn to think for themselves, a point that I agree with. The methods of teaching that he describes here focus on making the learner process, question, and draw conclusions from the information they were learning, which I believe will both teach them the information and teach them how to learn. Personally I envision the utopian education experience to be one where students learn how to learn, rather than just learn facts that they may or may not be able to apply to their lives and future occupations. As the author points out though, the methods described won't fit every teaching situation, so they must be taken as ideas rather than a cook-book for great teaching. As I read it I viewed his thoughts as jumping-off points for thinking about my own creative ways to teach without Telling. Many of the ideas that he suggests remind me of things that I do with my students (such as teaching through writing to and for your students), and some of his ideas have given me "food for thought" for creating positive changes in my classes. I enjoyed reading this book, and I think that any teachers who are interested in pedagogy enhancement will enjoy it as well. His writing style is more conversational than technical, which makes the text enjoyable to read even for someone who may never have taken an education course (i.e., many faculty members). I would like to see some of his suggestions become more commonplace in higher education, so I would highly suggest this book to teachers and anyone interested in improving education.

This is a great place to start in looking for alternate teaching ideas. Finkel's methods are wonderful and even though presented at a college level, can be modified to work in a middle or high school classroom. If you are looking to find a way to teach without lecturing, read this book!

Terrific book that uses the Socratic method to teach students how to Think, and learn rather than memorize.

This month is the 10th anniversary of Donald Finkel's death. I came across his book a few month ago and once I started reading it, I was immediately taken in by both, the book and the author. I wish I could've met professor Finkel, I wish I were a student in one of his seminars, and I wish every teacher would read this book.

Finkel's exhorts readers to abandon the prevalent model of teaching as TELLING, He writes:
"Our natural, unexamined model for teaching is Telling...The fundamental act of teaching is to carefully and clearly tell students something they did not previously know. Knowledge is transmitted, we imagine through the act of telling." What we think of as good teachers just do this in a more captivating way than the not so good ones.

This is the model we need to let go of because, as Finkel points out, numerous studies show that lectures as an instructional method do not deliver results when variables studied include retention of information after a course is over, transfer of knowledge to novel situations, development of skill in thinking or problem solving, or achievement of affective outcomes, such as motivation for additional learning or change in attitudes.

Instead of teaching by telling, Finkel argues that the most important role for a good teacher is to create conditions that inspire students to learn. He suggests that, "a teacher's job is to shape the environment in a manner conducive to learning," i.e. to create surrounding social and physical conditions that facilitate learning. Finkel approaches learning as a designer and carefully walks the reader through a series of thoughtful and practical classroom designs that facilitate learning, from writing workshops to open-ended seminars and co-teaching colloquia. He even incorporates lectures into some of his designs but these are surrounded by other types of interactions and are carefully inserted to achieve desired outcomes. Every learning design aims to create an intellectual community that propels participants to want to "figure things out" for themselves rather than for a grade. Finkel is a master of understanding social or community aspects of learning. He draws inspiration from John Dewey and Rousseau but makes theoretical discourse practical and accessible.

What I found particularly appealing about his writing is the respect and care with which Finkel writes about students. It is clear that he was deeply passionate about teaching and students, This is evident from reading some of the personal letters he and his students exchanged as a part of the learning process. Finkel always emphasizes that teaching is a learning experience for him--whether this involves participating in a seminar or a workshop along with students, sometimes without saying anything-reading students' writings or writing to them. He does not hide the fact that there are the inherent hierarchies in the classroom setting or tricks students into engaging with the subject. He is transparent about what he is doing, arguing that what happens in the classroom is a learning experience in its own right, as important as the subject matter being discussed.

His approach epitomizes the dictum proposed by Rousseau in 1762: "the only instrument of education that can succeed is well-regulated freedom. " I hope many more educators and policymakers read this remarkable book.