Following his presentation at the POD conference, Brookfield and I entered into a wide-ranging conversation on teaching, expanding on some points in his speech and exploring some others as well. Here are some highlights. Understanding how students experience learning, he's come to feel, far outstrips the value of any particular approach or technique in becoming a better teacher. Arranging chairs in a circle is good. Student journals are good.
Group work is good.
In a teaching world where the tide of common conversation reviles the lecture as the most outmoded and ineffective teaching method, Brookfield has developed more and more respect for the lecture and now feels he sees its uses. Likewise, with group work, he's come to feel it has a dark side and cannot be uncritically accepted. People do it because they want to make their classes more empathic and participatory and democratic. Those are all laudable aims, and I would support them. But I think the evangelical rhetoric sometimes overpowers attention to context and masks the fact that groups can be forums where egomaniacs can run wild and where some people's voices become silenced.