Teaching for Tomorrow: Teaching Content and Problem-Solving Skills,   ISBN:9781412913843

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This is an excellent book for any practising teacher. We all know "content" is required to be taught by syllabi and we all know students simply memorize, re-gurgitate and forget such content.

Ted McCain shows you how to deliver content in ways the students will remember and by which they will acquire problem-solving skills as well - the skills needed by our students for the "real world".

The other beauty of this book is its size - you can absorb the contents and start using the ideas within a week. Yet, you can return after a module and refine your practice further. I sincerely believe it made me a better teacher even after 15 years teaching experience.

Customer Rating: 

Teaching for Tomorrow is a quick (90 page) book that lays out a great rationale for changing pedagogy towards real-world project-based-learning where the teacher steps away from "telling" mode. Chapter one is "How I discovered I was a highly educated useless person." Then McCain outlines six proposals that would help schools create graduates who are not "useless": 1) resisting the tempatation to "tell" 2) providing context to content, 3) fostering independent thinking, 4) moving to problem solving, 5) withdrawing from helping students, & 6) reevaluating evaluation. Along the way he touches on the importance of failing and how we learn more from mistakes than from success. The author is a technology coordinator and he provides several examples for the kinds of role-playing problems solving that he is advocating, but this is not a book about technology. It is applicable to all disciplines. You can "look inside" the book at Google Book Search.

I identified with McCain's story that described how he felt like he didn't have real world skills after graduating from his university. He argues that schools currently are good at giving students "school skills" but they don't give students real-world skills. His six proposals are not new, and they are included in educational degrees for teachers, but the reality in many classrooms is that these approaches are not used. By and large, we are still using a curriculum defined by text books and focused on preparation for high-stakes tests. McCain recognizes the importance of accountability and testing but suggests that there is more value in a pedagogical approach that creates real-world skills while still delivering the content we want students to absorb.

My only criticism of the book is it doesn't go into the dynamics of a classroom of 20+ students. He has some good examples of role-playing and problem-solving scenarios that you can easily imagine a group of 3-4 students excelling at, but classroom management of this approach for 20 students becomes more complex. This could use some explication.