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Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection
This pathbreaking book for educators shows that focusing on relationships, resilience, and reflection can better prepare graduates for the future.
Learning something new—particularly something that might change your mind—is much more difficult than most teachers think. Because people think with their emotions and are influenced by their communities and social groups, humans tend to ignore new information unless it fits their existing worldview. Thus facts alone, even if discussed in detail, typically fail to open minds and create change. In a world in need of graduates who can adapt to new information and situations, we need to renew our educational commitment to producing flexible and independent thinkers.
In Teaching Change, José Antonio Bowen argues that education needs to be redesigned to take into account how human thinking, behaviors, bias, and change really work. Drawing on new research, Bowen explores how we can create better conditions for learning that focus less on teachers and content and more on students and process. He also examines student psychology, history, assumptions, anxiety, and bias and advocates for education to focus on a new 3Rs—relationships, resilience, and reflection. Finally, he suggests explicit learning designs to foster the ability to think for yourself.
The case for a liberal (by which Bowen means liberating) education has never been stronger, but, he says, it needs to be redesigned to achieve the goal of creating lifelong learners and citizens capable of divergent and independent thinking. With an expansive and powerful argument, Teaching Change combines elegant and gripping explanations of recent and wide-ranging research from biology, economics, education, and neuroscience with hundreds of practical suggestions for individual teachers.
Learning something new—particularly something that might change your mind—is much more difficult than most teachers think. Because people think with their emotions and are influenced by their communities and social groups, humans tend to ignore new information unless it fits their existing worldview. Thus facts alone, even if discussed in detail, typically fail to open minds and create change. In a world in need of graduates who can adapt to new information and situations, we need to renew our educational commitment to producing flexible and independent thinkers.
In Teaching Change, José Antonio Bowen argues that education needs to be redesigned to take into account how human thinking, behaviors, bias, and change really work. Drawing on new research, Bowen explores how we can create better conditions for learning that focus less on teachers and content and more on students and process. He also examines student psychology, history, assumptions, anxiety, and bias and advocates for education to focus on a new 3Rs—relationships, resilience, and reflection. Finally, he suggests explicit learning designs to foster the ability to think for yourself.
The case for a liberal (by which Bowen means liberating) education has never been stronger, but, he says, it needs to be redesigned to achieve the goal of creating lifelong learners and citizens capable of divergent and independent thinking. With an expansive and powerful argument, Teaching Change combines elegant and gripping explanations of recent and wide-ranging research from biology, economics, education, and neuroscience with hundreds of practical suggestions for individual teachers.
- GenresEducation
484 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 28, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
March 30, 2022
I read this book as a part of a Faculty Learning Community on my campus. The author, Jose Bowen, was the keynote speaker for this year's teaching and learning symposium, and he really captured my imagination. It was like a group brainstorming session, and he had so many great ideas to share. It was inspiring. I chose to continue engaging with his ideas by participating in this FLC.
"Teaching Change" is centered around a problem and a solution. The problem: the world continues to change at a much faster pace, and in order to succeed you need to be nimble and able to change. However, our education system is not well designed for that. The solution is to explicitly design for that, to "teaching change," to emphasize critical thinking and problem solving skills that are transferrable. We need to teach more process and less content. Students don't just learn critical thinking by osmosis, like we expect them to.
The book is very well designed. Every idea is backed up by pedagogical and psychological research. The book is great just as a bibliography. But Bowen's has put together a powerful schema for educators centered around three drivers of change (meaning, behavior, and motivation) and three prerequisites needed for students to learn to change (relationships, reflection, and resilience).
The book left we with a lot to think about and more than I could ever implement. But I have already tried adjusting my teaching in light of his ideas, and I would like to revisit the book again.
"Teaching Change" is centered around a problem and a solution. The problem: the world continues to change at a much faster pace, and in order to succeed you need to be nimble and able to change. However, our education system is not well designed for that. The solution is to explicitly design for that, to "teaching change," to emphasize critical thinking and problem solving skills that are transferrable. We need to teach more process and less content. Students don't just learn critical thinking by osmosis, like we expect them to.
The book is very well designed. Every idea is backed up by pedagogical and psychological research. The book is great just as a bibliography. But Bowen's has put together a powerful schema for educators centered around three drivers of change (meaning, behavior, and motivation) and three prerequisites needed for students to learn to change (relationships, reflection, and resilience).
The book left we with a lot to think about and more than I could ever implement. But I have already tried adjusting my teaching in light of his ideas, and I would like to revisit the book again.
November 15, 2023
The first few chapters hyped me up & I was ready to conquer all change with courage & resilience. And then the author decided to make the case for the impossibility of change. Say what?!?! So I put the book down for a LOOOONG time. I’ve revisited a few significant ideas I had marked up & decided to finish it. I’m glad I did but it’s not for the faint of heart.
April 30, 2022
Discovered as part of a book club community at my institution. Loved all the teaching hacks and key points to come back to. Sooo much to digest and process how to make this live in our classrooms and colleges
May 4, 2022
I enjoyed teaching naked a bit more than this read, but I still found nuggets of interesting information to incorporate into my curriculum. I will have to reread this when I am not in a frightful semester of grading and creating.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews