Finally, a teacher is talking about what happens in classrooms! After so many years of being told by "experts" how classrooms work, we have at last a look into the real life dynamics of social relations in an elementary classroom. Here is a page turner that takes us into the lives of young children in schools and describes how children build a learning community. Here, also, is the account of a teacher researcher who does not know all the answers but hopes to learn more about her students' world by carefully documenting their 'social' work. This book is sometimes hilarious, sometimes disturbing -- but in the end we all learn something about the assumptions we have made about gender roles, power, and the ways young children understand their world.

Well, I haven't been so struck by a book in a LONG TIME! You really must read this one. It's even better than her other great work, Talking Their Way Into Science, which focused on the role of open-ended "science talks" in her 1-2 classroom. This one ranges throughout the elementary curriculum demonstrating Ms. Gallas' extraordinary gift for insight at the same time as arguing for the efficacy of researching one's own practice as a teacher. There are chapters on the everyday mundane things -- like sharing time, dealing with those frustrating "bad boys" that mess up the class for everyone else, observing a new immigrant student becoming part of the classroom community -- that help us see how they are crucial learning experiences for the teacher and the students. There are chapters on science and arts education, that expand our notions of what these realms of elementary curriculum might mean. And there is throughout a powerful introduction for all of us to Bakhtin and other theorizers on language and learning that makes such literature acessible and applicable to our day-to-day life in the classroom.

Karen Gallas does extensive research into the method of letting children talk to learn as a learning technique. This book can be used as a handbook on how to integrate this type of teaching method into your own classroom. This is an excellent resource for any teacher wanting to really let their students interact with the content that you are teaching.