This book was about a group of teachers who got together on their own time to form a class. These teachers met at least once a week to discuss the successes and failures that they experience throughout their classroom. The overall theme of the book and the meetings is collaboration. These classes are about discussion things like the trials and errors or creating a curriculum, multicultural issues in the classroom, classroom motivation, alternatives to working straight from the textbook, students vs. our personal lives, parents and grading. When I read this book, I felt as if I was a part of the class. I was very in tune with what the teachers were saying, because working in the school systems I am sympathetic with their failures and successes.

"The Having of Wonderful Ideas", by Eleanor Duckworth, was not quite what I expected. Although I learned from some aspects of the book I expected more"ideas" that could be easily understood and incoporated into classroom activities. I felt that the essays on the many experiments conducted by the author and Piaget were far too lengthy, almost drowning out any real "wonderful ideas". This book is not easy to read, and may leave the reader struggling to read to the end. However, as I stated previously I did learn a few things, but they came too far and few between the lengthy essays.

This book is excellent. It is an important read for teachers today. As an educator it is extremely disheartening to see the direction of education being driven today by politicians, rather than parents and teachers. Ms. Duckworth redirects are attention where it belongs, on the students & how they learn. This book gets us (teachers) thinking about the kind of classroom culture we want to create for our children. It is about what we value as educators. Don't mistake it for a quick reference, how-to book. This is not meant to be a outline of various lesson plans to try out with your class. It is more thoughtful than that and more important

For me, the real strength of this book is the way the presence of Eleanor Duckworth shines through her writing. I liken it more to the beacon provided by a lighthouse than to a how-to manual that describes rowing techniques. The clear direction that shown through for me was that learning is complex, and that teacher behaviors must be equally complex, but the guiding light is simple: Listen to and respect the learner and respond with your whole person, and the learning that needs to happen will occur, for both partners in the process.