Teaching Content Outrageously: How to Captivate All Students and Accelerate Learning, Grades 4-12

by Stanley Pogrow

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.

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Shawn Bird]

While I'm not quite convinced that the strategies suggested are the panacea Pogrow declares them to be, and the work is lacking any significant data to support its assertions of transformative practice, this is a very inspiring book.

The ideas are explained well, and Pogrow is an enthusiastic cheer-leader. It's difficult not to catch his infectious enthusiasm for including dramatic surprises to invigorate sad lessons. Definitely worth a try.

I based a presentation at grad school on this work.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese]

No idea why I asked for this book on ILL at work. Although it was an interesting view into a way to use drama to engage students -- the teacher acting as a single mother in 1920s New York and trying to figure out how to solve her problems -- she asks the students to read a chapter in their books to tell her what to do (it's about forming unions). Or the students who were taken to a "coffee house" in 1950s Beat New York to read poetry.

[Zahreen]

I wish I had read this book at the beginning of my first year of teaching, when I had more energy for planning! If I stay another year in the classroom, I will definitely try to plan some lessons using the lesson plan format in the book.

[Wee Nam Chua]

how we can teach without boring our kids to death

[Holly Jorgenson]

I love the ideas in this book, but I'm not sure they would work in the day to day classroom.