Twenty Teachers

Twenty Teachers offers insightful profiles that will enable others to inspire learning in their students and voices a new view of today's educational system.

Turning his back on such evidence as scores on minimum competency tests, Ken Macrorie set out to find teachers whose students consistently do brilliant and meaningful works. The result of his search is 20 Teachers, a collection of lively, revealing profiles of teachers working in many different subjects at all levels of the educational system. Macrorie's interviews show an astonishing similarity in the beliefs, methods, and attitudes of these educators and the keys to their success with students from first grade to the graduate level.

Ranging from a woodworking instructor in a wealthy suburban school to an inner-city high school history teacher and a professor of space engineering, the teachers profiled here share a fundamental belief in putting choice and responsibility in the hands of their students, no matter what their age. Macrorie sums up their advice in a list of 43 items that help learners to do "good works." Finally, in an "Open Letter about Schools," he explores the notion that many schools have unwittingly developed traditions that run counter to the way their best educators work.

20 Teachers offers insights that will enable other teachers to foster learning in their students, and voices new and challenging views of today's educational system.

Ken Macrorie is Emeritus Professor of English at Western Michigan University and a staff member at the Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury, Vermont. He is author of Uptaught and Telling Writing and a number of other books.