Commonsense Questions about Instruction

Parents want teachers to explain how they instruct children. They become annoyed when the teachers are silent or surly. Parents counter with explicit, common sense questions: how do teachers arouse interest, design curricula, reinforce discipline, assign grades, designate textbooks, and select technology? This book examines the parents' questions, the answers they elicited, the allies they attracted, and the improvements they initiated.

My experience in preparing teacher candidates and educational leaders reinforces the need to give thought to the type of questions that parents, community leaders, and the general public will ask them. Some of the appealing features of this book are that each chapter highlights an important educational question, the answers to it, and the context for those answers. Dr. Giordano effectively uses the case study method to present pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, and administrators with real-world experiences., This book will increase the knowledge of a subject that will be in the news forever—education. Although it is hard to ask the right educational questions, those questions deserve great and accurate responses. Gerry Giordano has provided an invaluable service by examining the questions and the attempts to answer them.

Gerard Giordano is professor at the University of North Florida and has written more than a dozen books about education. His last five books, which were published by Rowman & Littlefield Education, focused on the case method.