Citation
(2004), "Getting the Buggers to Think", Education + Training, Vol. 46 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/et.2004.00446bae.001
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2004, Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Getting the Buggers to Think
Getting the Buggers to Think
Sue CowleyContinuum2004ISBN 0826464688
Candidate for best book title in 2004? It certainly caught my attention. Along with "getting the b … s to read" I have lost count how many times I have used such a phrase following teaching sessions. Interestingly, my context is higher education; Sue Cowley's is school. So, is this book irrelevant in respect of the nation's supposed elite students? Surely thinking skills are an integral and necessary part of a student's "toolbag" as they commence higher education? Well, not in my experience.
It should be stressed that many of the author's examples and illustrations are firmly based within a school context. But overall, the issues and problems she addresses seem to me to relate as well to higher education as to school. Perhaps this is an indictment of our school education system and curriculum. Perhaps Cowley's book should be required reading on every teaching training course?
The central issues the book covers are thinking – concentration, behaviour and learning; planning and teaching thinking; critical thinking; creative thinking; and thinking and ideas. I particular enjoyed the latter chapters on critical thinking and thinking and ideas. Here, for example, Cowley discusses and illustrates how to develop an argument. Having recently read a pile of student exam scripts which showed minimal evidence of any such ability, the value of her ideas hit home strongly.
Cowley devotes a key part of her final chapter to asking her readers to contribute their own ideas to the book; the best of which she undertakes to include in the second edition. My only disappointment was that the book only touches on what I would call "theorising"; nor does it address "modelling". How nice it would be not to see so many blank faces when first introducing a theoretical idea or a conceptual model. So, these are my suggestions.
I will end on a congratulatory note; either to the author or the publishers – the title is risky but spot on. Well done.