Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series)

• Shows how teachers can encourage inquiry, exploration, discussion, and debate in their courses.
• Presents a wide variety of strategies for stimulating active learning and for coaching writing and critical thinking.
• Offers teachers concrete advice on how to design courses, structure assignment, use class time, critique student performance, and model critical thinking activities.
• Demonstrates how writing can easily be integrated with such other critical thinking activities and inquiry discussions, simulation games, classroom debates, and interactive lectures.

In sum, this is not just a book of potential exercies - it is a rich resource for instructors grappling with issues of assessment, critiquing, and the fear of grading overload. These topics and more provided me with some wonderful "aha" moments.

It's the "aha"s that spark my spirit of inquiry - and this is what I strive to share with students.


insightful, thoughtful, and full of useful classroom tools   January 7, 1999
 49 out of 56 found this review helpful

Bean's text is a thoughtful and useful pedagogical "storehouse" of ideas that teachers can use in their classrooms. Not only does the text provide the theory _behind_ collaborative/cooperative approaches to teaching, but it provides such ideas for a wide array of subjects. Anyone who values the teaching of writing--whatever the subject area--will find good value in Bean's text.