The Lazy Teacher’s Handbook
How your students learn more when you teach less

By Jim Smith

Crown House Publishing 

Reviewer: Barry Hymer, Director, Still Thinking UK Ltd

There are many books on the market which offer a compendium of fun and funky ideas for teachers anxious to engage their students more actively in their classes.  However I’ve not encountered many to match this one for writing style (lucid, easy and entertaining, much in the manner of his mentor Ian Gilbert), organisation and coherence to a unifying idea - the notion that teachers can and should teach less so that learners learn more.  

In offering up his ‘Lazy Way’ antidote to teacher fatigue and student passivity I’m reminded of John West-Burnham’s suspicion that children go to school in order to watch their teachers work.  The author of this book sets about combating these tendencies with a series of chapters addressing such themes as lesson outcomes, marking, IT, classroom language, differentiation, SEAL (Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning), the use of teaching assistants, etc, and packing each with a pot-pourri of ideas for practical and learner-led classroom activities.  Few of these activities are original, although many have been given creative twists.  On the contrary, in keeping with the ‘Lazy Way,’ the author has unashamedly pinched and synthesised ideas from a rich panoply of sources - his past and present colleagues, courses he’s attended, books he’s read (Sue Cowley’s oeuvre is an apparent influence) and - perhaps most significantly and congruently - students he’s taught.  The overall product is a delight and will be richly welcomed by teachers seeking to claim back their lives in the face of relentless demands imposed by national diktat, institutional expectations, student and parental expectations, and their own inner voices of guilt and self-denial.

Although this book orients itself deliberately towards the hard-pressed classroom practitioner and therefore wears its research base lightly, there is very little within it that doesn’t have a distinguished academic pedigree as a buttress - not least a strong emphasis on reflective, metacognitive and meta-learning tasks which put the learner in control of his or her own learning development.  It will therefore avoid the charge justly levelled at some of its antecedents - that it’s not much more than a populist collection of superficially attractive but learning- and evidence-lite tips-for-teachers of the ‘Here’s another learning style questionnaire’ variety.

In summary, this book deserves a place in every staffroom.  Place it on the centre table, invite all staff to enjoy it and then, to misquote Auden, 

Stop all the bells, disconnect the LCD
Deny the kids a word-search with a mental age of three
Dazzle the inspector and with seated bum
Bring on Independence, and let Learning come.

GEI Vol 26 No 2/3