This is one of the most stimulating books about teaching that I have read in many years. I recommend it to anyone with an ongoing interest in ways of changing teaching and learning.

Don Finkel, who died in 1999, taught at Evergreen College, and the experimental culture of that admirably progressive institution is reflected in these pages.

It would be easy for a reader to dismiss some of Finkel's ideas about teaching with the reflection that most of us do not teach at colleges with a dedication to progressivism in higher education, that we are compelled (unlike our colleagues at Evergreen) to assign letter grades, that institutional conditions make it more difficult to arrange team teaching, and so on. All of these observations, or excuses, are actually true for most of us.

But they miss the main point, which is the bracing, liberating, courageous attitude toward education that breathes through these pages. We may not replicate Evergreen in our own institutions, but every one of us can teach better and there is much in Teaching With Your Mouth Shut that can help us do it.

Though is not necessary to agree entirely with Finkel's definitions of education-which are broadly Piagetian-to profit from the book, one must see the force of such important claims as these:

(from John Dewey). . . no thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. The communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does he think.

(from Jean-Jacques Rousseau) All the instruments [of education] have been tried save one, the only one precisely that can succeed: well-regulated freedom.

(from Donald Finkel) The frustration or disequilibrium that arises from the disruption of an ongoing interaction with our world is what motivates learning.

Readers suspicious of Romantic notions of learning should be aware that Finkel means both parts of the Rousseauian definition: both the freedom, and the well-regulated. He discusses a number of classroom practices, all based on sound principle, all worth trying: for instance, the open-ended seminar, uses of student writing, and team teaching. About this last practice he has a useful set of requirements:

The two teachers must be equal.
The two teachers must be different.
The two teachers must act before their students primarily as intellectual colleagues, and not as teachers whose main job is to administer a course or deliver a curriculum.
A collegially taught course must of necessity be inquiry-centered.
Finally, collegial teachers must conceive of their students in a new way.

I am tempted to go on quoting this wise book--well, o.k., I will yield to the temptation: teaching should be "political" in the sense that the teacher should "think his vocation requires him to do all he can to promote his students' independence of mind, self-reliance, autonomy, judgment, sense of responsibility, and capacity to work productively as members of a group."

Donald Finkel's ambitious aim in this book is to change our notion of what good teaching is: to make us realize that it does not consist of a teacher talking, but instead is "the creating of circumstances that lead to significant learning in others." I believe him.

Merritt Moseley
UNC Asheville