BOOK REVIEW: Building a Better Teacher: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone) by Elizabeth Green.

As Green reveals, for most of the past century, education schools have contributed little to the task of “building a better teacher.” In her opening chapter, Green notes that “somehow all those Ed schools’ professors had managed to learn nothing about teaching.” Moreover, “the most prestigious among them—the elite education researchers—ignored teaching altogether.” Green asks: “How did this happen? How had an entire field come to neglect the work at its heart?”

It happened, in part, because the founders of the twentieth-century education schools—iconic figures like William James, Edward Thorndike, and John Dewey—were disinterested in the nitty-gritty of the classroom and thought little about how to improve methods of instruction. (Thorndike abhorred school visits, calling them “a bore.”) Instead, they preferred to write and do research about more intellectually challenging subjects, such as psychology and human intelligence. What Green calls the uniquely American “myth of the natural-born teacher,” along with the corollary assumption that good teachers simply “know what to do to help their students learn,” also encouraged the ed schools’ inattention to the art of teaching.