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When Teacher's Talk: 08/07/10

cover art

Rosalyn S. Schnall interviewed and surveyed 500 teachers from Chicago public schools. The result of those interviews are transcribed in When Teachers Talk. I chose to read it because I have friends and family members who are teachers and I've heard some interesting stories from them.

The anonymous responses are divided by categories. While one can see patterns when reading through the transcripts, there's no analysis of the data. It's just raw transcripts by topic.

I wanted a lot more from the book. I wanted to see how the different issues stack up against each other. I wanted to see proposed solutions and analysis of attempted solutions that might have failed. A graph or two would have helped too.

Five hundred pages of transcripts by themselves is nothing but noise. There's no way to gauge how bad the problem in Chicago is or how relevant the problem is to other school districts. Without that work I can't recommend the book.

I received the book from the author for review.

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