Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener

With seventeen chapters plus two appendices and running to 430 pages, Learning Teaching is wide-ranging. It is a crucial book for new teachers, as it gives a lot of support that is useful in the first few years of work. As an experienced teacher I found parts of it to be a little redundant. Having said this, if you have a number of years under your belt, it is still worth a look as Scrivener encourages you to try to do things that you may have ignored so far. I thought it very useful for reflecting on my own practice and also for inspiring new ideas.

The good thing about Learning Teaching is that it gets you to focus on your students rather than yourself. This is an important aspect of teaching because many of us are far too concerned with what we are doing as teachers, rather than what students experience as learners. Also, shifting the focus away from the teacher makes classes both more interesting and relaxing.

Apart from this shift in emphasis it is also simply a good reference book. It is jam-packed with ideas; not just in the toolkit chapters and resource sections but throughout. This is a book that you should come back to again and again so as to remind yourself of strategies you have forgotten. Also useful would be to periodically do one of the many observation tasks in Appendix 1.

On the whole this book is fantastic but it does suffer in some sections precisely because it tries to be so comprehensive. While I found the chapter on speaking to be very good, many of the ideas in the reading chapter were simply old hat. One section of the book that really is disappointing deals with teaching large classes. This is a problem that many teachers around the world face every day and drives many of them to despair. Scrivener’s treatment is brief and inadequate, something I wasn’t expecting after the thorough writing elsewhere.

Occasionally Scrivener also seems to enjoy including some rather silly comments, such as in his advice on lesson planning where he encourages you to try dreaming through the lesson. Despite this, he should be commended for his encouragement to try everything, no matter how outlandish. It is only through experimentation after all that new things are learned.

In conclusion, Scrivener’s book is a very positive and encouraging guide to teaching English language. It is an important read for anyone who seriously wants to teach.