"Student-Centered learning" is the current fad in educational circles, and it's a great concept if you're fortunate enough to have students who are centered enough in their own learning to respond effectively to the great ideas presented in this book. However, way too many of us do not have the luxury of teaching at a college where, according to Finkel in the Afterword, there are "no requirements for students, no majors, and no grades." In other words, the students are there to learn, and unfortunately this isn't the case in most colleges today, especially the community colleges, where, on the average, students are consumers who view meaningful learning as a bump in the road to their success, especially when they work two full time jobs, have 17 kids, and insist upon taking 18 hours a semester.

While I enjoyed reading about Finkel's teaching strategies, I found myself wondering how all this would work with my students at a community college in South Carolina, a state with a horrendous secondary educational system, where the best and brightest leave for greener collegiate pastures in other states, and the local colleges are stuck with those passive souls who have never been required to perform and don't expect to do much of anything except to be entertained.

Don't get me wrong. Finkel has some wonderful ideas about student-centered learning, but when I have used this approach in the past, my students tended to respond negatively. On evaluations, they have said that my student-centered approach was "an excuse for not being prepared." "He needs to learn how to lecture," one of them wrote. In other words, these T.V. babies want to be spoon fed, and, although Finkel correctly argues that a great teacher "refuses to teach" in the traditional sense, the student evaluations tell the tale, and that's the tale that number-crunching administrators hear.

One of Finkel's great ideas is to write each student a letter (usually four to five paragraphs) in response to each paper that they write. If I did that, I would still be writing letters from two semesters ago, because at my college we are required to teach five classes each semester, and most of these are composition courses consisting of as many as 23 students, some of whom can barely write a sentence. In these courses there are usually six papers due each semester. Can you imagine writing 690 letters a semester? I can't. But then again, Finkel isn't teaching composition, and for that he is to be commended.

To be fair to Finkel, I must say that anyone who is foolish enough to get into the educational field and fortunate enough to teach in a place that genuinely values education over consumerism, this book is definitely for you.

Finkel (may his soul rest in peace) outlines the joys and the difficulties of helping students connect with their most powerful and enduring teacher, themselves. I have long employed simulation and personal reflection as mediums for teaching adults, and found within this book much of the wisdom I have discovered for myself. Finkel notes that for many, their most powerful learnings have not happened in a classroom with a teacher present. Even so, we persist in creating classroom "learning" situations, just as if that were the proper medium for learning.

As another reviewer noted, these techniques might not gain immediate acceptance from students or administration. Remember, resistance IS the first stage of acceptance. For me, the tangle centers around my neediness to control how the learning will unfold battling with the student's neediness to simply be told. Since for most learning, there is (and can be) no simple "just do this" explanation, whenever I crumble under my neediness and simply tell, I steal a learning opportunity from my student. Stealing learning opportunities might not be the best use of any teacher's energies. Finkel explains how to set the stage and how to win this wrestling match with yourself. Explaining these opportunities away because of "unmotivated students" or "unsupportive administrations" merely guarantees that the neediness will win.

I cannot recommend this book strongly enough. It should be considered essential reading for anyone fool enough to pin the title of "Teacher" to their lapel. Like every competent professional, teaching requires that the practitioner understand that they cannot delight their customer by simply giving them what they want in the way they want it. True delight creeps in under the guise of novelty and surprise, as unexpected as Christmas in July. It sometimes requires that the teacher turn their mouth to the SHUT position so their student's brain can find its own ON position.

Book Review: Teaching With Your Mouth Shut, By Donald L. Finkel Reviewed by Ellie Marshall, M.S., Management Core Faculty, Connecticut Valley Region, College for Lifelong Learning, Lebanon, NH.

In what situations have you learned the most? Could it be that a teacher told you what to know or did you have to discover something for yourself? Here's how to get out from between the material and your students. _Teaching With Your Mouth Shut_ should be used as a guide to letting students do the hard work of learning with you guiding more as coach, mechanic, or spotlight operator than an expert, lecturer, and insuperable role model. Students interact with each other. The teacher's prime role is to design experiences that lead to discovery of the conceptual material.

Some may doubt, but it is possible to teach this way, even in a state community college system. I have used many of these methods for years. Back in 1998 I thanked this book's author, Don Finkel, my most memorable undergraduate mentor, during my acceptance speech as I received the Distinguished Faculty Award at The College for Lifelong Learning's graduation ceremony in Durham NH. A gymnasium filled with over 150 grandparents, parents, and adult children received Associates and Bachelor degrees, cheered on by their families in the bleachers. "He had an exemplary way of modeling good, curious learning behavior both as he was teaching and teaching with a colleague." I said at the podium. Don constructed and orchestrated some of the best learning environments I have ever experienced. Sadly, I read in 1999 that Don had died of cancer, but thankfully he left his sabbatical project _Teaching With Your Mouth Shut_, published in 2000 by Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.

"So this is what he was doing," I think as I read about using original author great books and book seminars where the students do the leading and talking. Don adheres to John Dewey's conviction of education as an active and constructive process and Socrates' practice of inquiry, because "knowledge is grounded in some other process than transfer from an unimpeachable Authority"(p.35). Teaching With Your Mouth Shut describes the powerful possibilities in a classroom where the faculty deliberately keeps the authority but turns the power over to students. To supplant teaching as the act of telling, written papers, conceptual workshops, student-to-student feedback on papers, and faculty letters to students about their ideas and the writing used to convey them, fulfill the process of reflection and learning. If you strive to cross-pollinate and belong to a high caliber learning community I highly recommend _Teaching With Your Mouth Shut_. It is written for all college and graduate level teachers in the hopes that they too will join in trying to chart a journey for their students, or in Don's words, "sustain a train of thought across a transformation" (p.89). Can we really teach with our mouth shut? Given the competition in higher education today, we will benefit by this inquiry, in order to "test it, to sharpen it, and to stabilize it (p. 89)." There is even a design for a conceptual workshop in the appendix so that we might experience the mouth shut process and see for ourselves what teaching can become.