Teaching Content Outrageously: How to Captivate All Students and Accelerate Learning, Grades 4-12 [Paperback] chapter Summaries:
Product Description
A powerful instructional method for “hooking” students on academic learning Drawing from a teaching model designed to banish boredom and student apathy, this book explains how dramatic practices can serve as powerful tools for enlivening lessons and captivating students, even the most resistant learners. Filled with intriguing classroom examples, Pogrow shows how any teacher can make use of dramatic techniques, such as surprise, humor, fantasy, role plays, games, and simulations to create standards-based content lessons that are riveting, effective, and meaningful. The author explains how to design such lessons into any content area. Stanley Pogrow (San Francisco, CA), a noted authority on teaching practices for disadvantaged students, is professor of educational leadership at San Francisco State University, where he coordinates the Educational Leadership for Equity Program.
From the Back Cover
For teachers who struggle to connect with students who seem restless, bored, and indifferent, Teaching Content Outrageously offers the perfect antidote. In this book, Stanley Pogrow shows teachers how to transform standards-based content lessons into dynamic and “outrageous” learning experiences that leave students so enthralled and fascinated they readily meet the learning goals. Drawing from a model successfully used with underperforming students, the author introduces the “Outrageous Teaching” method showing how teachers can integrate humor, surprise, imagination, character, and dramatic storyline to create lessons that are riveting, effective, and meaningful. The book includes:
- Detailed guidance on implementing the method in any content area in grades 4-12
- Vivid classroom portraits of teachers making use of the method to teach math, science, language arts, and social studies lessons
- Advice on applying the techniques to improvediscipline and classroom management
The author reveals how all teachers can tap into their own imagination and creativity to construct lessons and units that are mesmerizing and that efficiently increase student performance on content. Praise for Teaching Content Outrageously “Pogrow’s new book is a must-read for teachers seeking to find new ways to engage and successfully teach their students who would otherwise be left behind. The combination of cognitive science, humor, insight, techniques, and examples will make you laugh, inspire you, and give you the practical tools to create imaginative and original ways to teach key content objectives.”
—Dr. Pedro Portes, director, Center for Latino Achievement and Success in Education, andprofessor of education, University of Georgia “Is holding students’ attention becoming more and more difficult? Let Stanley Pogrow show you how dramatization and humor can help you teach any content far more effectively to a wary classroom audience.”
—Carol Jago, teacher, Santa Monica High School,Santa Monica, CA “Dr. Pogrow gives priceless solutions and clear methods that work for making teaching and learning more fun and effective in today’s classrooms. This is the one book that should be read by all those who want to make a difference by captivating, inspiring, and empowering all learners.”
—Dalia Johnson, science and Spanish teacher, middle school director,¿ MS 188, New York CityPublic Schools
See all Editorial Reviews
Teaching Content Outrageously: How to Captivate All Students and Accelerate Learning, Grades 4-12 [Paperback] Book Reviews:
() I am writing my first review ever on Amazon in the hopes of saving other educators the time and money I wasted on this book. Poorly written and full of brutal spelling and grammatical errors, this book’s premise can be summarized in one sentence: Use dramatic presentations to enhance your teaching. For example, if you are teaching about a certain historical event, you might try dressing up as a person from that time period. (Who knew!?) The author then fills 220+ pages by explaining the history of dramatic technique as a learning tool, providing a list of fee-based websites that will help you create crossword puzzles for your students (which, in addition to being worthless, are also sites the author himself admits he’s never used), and explaining how “expressive microbursts” of dramatic voice inflection can improve your classroom management.
Do yourself a favor and skip this book.
In the first chapter, I realized that the author was on an ego-trip, introducing the concept of “teaching content outrageously” with vagueness and attempts to validate the idea before even presenting it. It took three chapters to get to the meat of the subject, and after reading the whole book, I felt that Pogrow’s system of teaching outrageously was lacking–in research and applicability. I noticed grammar errors, a tremendous lack of editing (how many times can an author use “indeed”?), and that, overall, it didn’t function to provide the reader with a good method for creating the so-called “outrageous” lessons. The lessons cited in the book were interesting, but I didn’t walk away inspired or with any new approach to education. I certainly understand the premise of creating dramatic and engaging lessons, but this book was not comprehensive enough to provide the tools for an educator to create such lessons consistently or well. “Teaching Content Outrageously” was more of a memoir about Pogrow’s experiences–filled with anecdotes and built on Pogrow’s assertions of the weakness of “conventional teaching”–rather than a guide for educational leadership supported by data and wide-ranging examples of documented successes. Pogrow spent a large portion of the book more or less vilifying conventional instruction and upon reaching the virtual end of the book stated, “It is time…to stop trying to prove that one [method] is better than the other” (186). The author also asserted that “Outrageous” education might be the only new answer to solve our existing educational crisis–that all other possible reforms are just rehashing old ideas with new names (179). Meanwhile, Powgrow was really intent on selling his method’s name–I kept waiting for the word “Outrageous” to show up with the trademark symbol. The narrative seemed to overstate results to reinforce the efficacy of the outrageous teaching, for example, “From that day forward, Tamarra never had a problem getting the class to make quick transitions.” For an author who frequently recommended the use of “Creative Authenticity”, I wondered if this kind of exaggeration was meant to be an example of just how creative (and perhaps unfounded) this approach was.
This might be a great book for some, but I couldn’t recommend it. Jossey-Bass has published some very helpful texts in the past, and I would encourage educators and future educators to keep looking for those.
I am writing this as the mother of a smart and highly creative student. I watched in dismay and frustration as she increasingly tuned out school as a high school student. She found that her artistic impulses were at total odds with how classes and school were conducted. She felt stifled, bored, and could not make a connection with how she was being taught and felt that her teachers made no effort to connect with her. Her friends,who were similarly talented, were equally alienated from school.
When I saw title of this book it spoke to my frustration with typical instruction and I knew I had to read it. At last! Someone who understood how my daughter, and countless others like her, need to be taught. I laughed and cried as I read the book. While as a non-educator I was less interested in some of the early background chapters on learning, except for its general message on the importance of imagination to learning, I found the chapters that described the method and the examples easy to understand, practical, and compelling. Why doesn’t everyone teach this way? Why aren’t teachers taught and even required to teach this way?
If my daughter was still in school I would give every one of her teachers a copy of this book. I am writing this review for the other mothers whose children are similarly alienated from learning and who are still in school, to recommend that you push your school to engage in Outrageous instruction.