Explores the key dynamics of a learning-centered classroom and how to bring educators' identities and backgrounds into practice by soliciting and responding to student feedback, negotiating power dynamics, and the ways institutional constraints, students, and self-concepts can sabotage efforts.
Features discussion questions to hone the teaching craft and encourage important conversation.
Covers topics such as classroom democratization, critical thinking and reflection, race and power, and more.
An ideal companion for college and university educators who continue to reflect critically about their teaching practice.
“Teaching Well is a profoundly engaging volume that explores courageously many dimensions at the heart of emancipatory education. Reflective of the knowledge, brilliance, and wisdom gleaned from extensive interviews with Stephen Brookfield on his critical insights on democratizing classrooms, pedagogy, and teachers as leaders, the book makes a radically hopeful contribution to the scholarship in the field. This is most significant in the midst of the difficult conditions that teachers and students are facing today.”
Antonia Darder, Professor Emerita, Loyola Marymount University, USA
Becoming a White AntiRacist: A Practical Guide for Educators, Leaders and Activists
Published 2021
A real-world how-to manual for talking about race in the classroom
Educators and activists frequently call for the need to address the lingering presence of racism in higher education. Yet few books offer specific suggestions and advice on how to introduce race to students who believe we live in a post-racial world where racism is no longer a real issue. In Teaching Race the authors offer practical tools and techniques for teaching and discussing racial issues at predominately White institutions of higher education. As current events highlight the dynamics surrounding race and racism on campus and the world beyond, this book provides teachers with essential training to facilitate productive discussion and raise racial awareness in the classroom. A variety of teaching and learning experts provide insights, tips, and guidance on running classroom discussions on race. They present effective approaches and activities to bring reluctant students into a consideration of race and explore how White teachers can model racial awareness, thereby inviting students into the process of examining their own white identity.
Racism, whether evident in overt displays or subconscious bias, has repercussions that reverberate far beyond the campus grounds. As the cultural climate increasingly calls out for more research, education, and dialogue on race and racism, this book helps teachers spotlight issues related to race in a way that leads to effective classroom and campus conversation. The book provides guidance on how to:
Create the conditions that facilitate respectful racial dialogue by building trust and effectively negotiating conflict
Uncover each student’s own subconscious bias and the intersectionality that exists even in the most homogenous-appearing classrooms
Help students embrace discomfort, and adapt discussion methods to accommodate issues of race and positionality
Avoid common traps, mistakes, and misconceptions encountered in anti-racist teaching
Predominantly White institutions face a number of challenges in dealing with race issues, including a lack of precedence, an absence of modeling by campus leaders, and little clear guidance on how teachers can identify and challenge racism on campus. Teaching Race is packed with activities, suggestions and exercises to provide practical real-world help for teachers trying to introduce race in class. Published 2019.
Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher
Align your teaching with student outcomes
Understand and manage classroom power dynamics
See your practice from new perspectives
Engage learners via multiple teaching formats
Uncover hegemonic assumptions & practices
Model critical thinking for your students
Negotiate complex rhythms of diverse classrooms
This fully revised second edition features a wealth of new material, including new chapters on critical reflection in the context of social media, teaching race and racism, leadership in a critically reflective key, and team teaching as critical reflection. In addition, all chapters have been thoroughly updated and expanded to align with today's classrooms, whether online or face-to-face, in large lecture formats or small groups. Published 2017.
The Discussion Book: 50 Great Ways to Get People Talking
by Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill
Do you need a resource that you can pull out of your pocket to liven up meetings, trainings, professional development, and teaching? The fifty easily applied techniques in this timely manual spur creativity, stimulate energy, keep groups focused, and increase participation. Whether you're teaching classes, facilitating employee training, leading organizational or community meetings, furthering staff and professional development, guiding town halls, or working with congregations, The Discussion Book is your go-to guide for improving any group process. Published 2016.
Previous Publications
The Skillful Teacher: On Trust, Technique and Responsiveness in the Classroom (3rd edition, 2015)
Engaging Imagination: Helping Students Become Creative and Reflective Thinkers, co-authored with Alison James (2014)
Teaching for Critical Thinking: Tools and Techniques to Help Students Question Their Assumptions (2011) #
Radicalizing Learning: Adult Education for a Just World (2010) #
The Handbook of Race and Adult Education: A Resource for Dialogue on Racism (2010)
Teaching Reflectively in Theological Contexts: Promises and Contradictions, co-edited with Mary E. Hess (2008)
Learning as a Way of Leading: Lessons from the Struggle for Social Justice, co-authored with Stephen Preskill (2008)
The Power of Critical Theory: Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching (2005) #
Discussion as a Way of Teaching, co-authored with Stephen Preskill (2nd edition, 2005) =
Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher (1st ed., 1995) #
Learning Democracy (1988)
Training Educators of Adults (1988)
Developing Critical Thinkers (1987) #
* Winner of the Philip E. Frandson Award for Literature in Continuing Higher Education
# Winner of the Cyril O. Houle World Award for Literature in Adult Education
+ Winner of the Imogene Okes Award for Outstanding Research in Adult Education
= Educational Studies Association Critics' Choice
