The Skillful Teacher

Fifteen Maxims of Skillful Teaching
Finally, let me end this book by summarizing some of the major
themes stressed throughout its pages. These comprise Brookfield’s
Fifteen Maxims of Skillful Teaching.
Maxim 1: Expect Ambiguity
Legislation that requires teachers to teach to the test, curricula that
purport to be “teacher-proof,” manuals of practice that take you
through a sequenced application of prescribed tasks designed to
induce certain predetermined competencies or outcomes—all these
practices rest on the assumption that classrooms are essentially ratio-
nal, ordered environments from which surprise and serendipity can
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be banished. As anyone who has been in a college classroom more
than five minutes knows, this assumption is ridiculous. This is not
to say that the elements of sequence, order, and reason do not have
an important place in teaching. We couldn’t teach without them,
students can’t learn without them, and institutions and licensing
bodies operate based on them. But teachers quickly realize that
teaching is a journey into uncertainty in which they gradually learn
to recognize those times when they need to abandon their reliance
on standardized practices and curricula.
As teachers we regularly cross borders of chaos into zones of
ambiguity. For every event in which we feel things are working out
as we anticipated, there are two that confound our expectations. It
is difficult enough to predict one person’s response to a classroom
exercise, let alone to predict the multiple responses of a diverse
group of students to a single lesson unit. Context and contingency
will distort the most perfectly planned curriculum or project.