In case you missed it .."Conversations With Great Teachers"

http://www.booktv.org/Program/11977/Conversations+with+Great+Teachers.aspx

Education - Conversations with Great Teachers - Book TV
www.booktv.org

Bill Smoot talks about "Conversations with Great Teachers," a collection of interviews that he conducted with exceptional teachers (K-12, college, professional courses, military, political mentors) to find out what makes them so effective. Mr. Smoot spoke at Books, Inc. in Berkeley, California.

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Learning About Learning with Bill Smoot
The Berkeley author examines what makes good teachers good, even when they teach alligator-wrestling.
By Anneli Rufus
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/learning-about-learning-with-bill-smoot/Content?oid=2102418


Having taught at every level from K-12 to college, Bill Smoot has instructed thousands of students. As the possessor of a Ph.D from Purdue University, he's absorbed skills and wisdom from hundreds of teachers.

How teaching happens — part dialogue, part monologue, part memorization, part alchemy — fascinates the Berkeley resident. To research his new book Conversations With Great Teachers, Smoot spent nearly two years meeting educators, from a first-grade teacher to a ballet instructor to a woman who teaches yoga in jails to a man who trains adults to wrestle alligators. Each walks a different path, yet all share certain qualities in common, Smoot said.

"Great teachers have great passion for teaching," he said. "For them, teaching is not merely a job, but a calling. They have an ability to tune in to their students and know when they understand and when they do not understand. They care deeply and passionately for and about their students."

Their methods varied widely. Some were gentle, some aggressive. Some were nearly invisible, some larger than life. They perform alchemy in that "every act of learning involves a change in the learner. Acquiring a fact is a small change; learning to act, to perform surgery, or to be a soldier ... is a larger transformation. The student who once did not understand poetry but now loves it is a new person." The student-teacher relationship rests on trust, humility, patience, and what Smoot calls "the excitement of thinking beyond the given." During his interview with a ninetysomething fencing teacher, the aged athlete "cradled my hands in his and adjusted my grip. Then he had me move the foil this way and that, explaining why this grip was the best, and I understood in both my hand and my mind that it was. The understanding was embodied, literally," remembered the author, who will be at Books Inc. (1760 Fourth St., Berkeley) on Tuesday, October 12.

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