As a warm-up project for the AltMBA I wrote a review of the book that has had the greatest influence on me as a teacher. It is Ron Ritchhart’s Creating Cultures of Thinking: The 8 Forces We Must Master to Truly Transform Our Schools

We all have stories about our school experiences. Often these ‘old school stories’ are about being passive and obedient. A student’s job was to achieve good grades and to please the teacher. Students were publicly sorted and ranked. Schools were institutionalised places focused on conformity. Reflecting on the qualities of past learning experiences can help illuminate our understanding of the qualities of the culture we want to create today. Often these ‘new school stories’ include creating more personalised relationships with students, developing learners’ independence, curiosity, and the disposition to think and ask questions, and making learning more engaging.

Effective teaching takes more than good planning and instructional design; it also requires attention to the culture of the classroom. The book explains how we create culture and how we mould it so that it supports students’ development as thinkers. A culture of thinking is where a group’s collective as well as individual thinking is valued, visible, and actively promoted every day. The book explores the eight cultural forces present in every group learning situation—language, time, environment, opportunities, routines, modelling, interactions, and expectations—and how they influence the group’s cultural dynamic. By becoming aware of them we can learn how to more effectively leverage them in order to create and build a culture of thinking.

When classrooms and schools (and organisations) focus on their culture, they become places of intellectual stimulation where the focus is not just on improving test scores, but on more deliberately developing learners who can think, create and question. Creating a culture of thinking is not a “quick fix” or something that can be simply installed. Creating a culture of thinking takes time, it is an ongoing process of small steps that needs constant attention.

This book has changed my mind by helping me to think about teaching differently. My teaching is now more student-centred and my classroom culture has become more oriented to learning rather than work completion. My role has shifted from the delivery of information to fostering students’ engagement with ideas. Previously, too often, the conversations in my classroom revolved around students attempting to guess what was in my head.

The key way that my teaching has changed is that I’m now much more responsive to students’ thinking. While I always wanted to care about their ideas, now I know how to do it. There is a point early in every school year when my students come to realise that I really value what they think. Once they understand this, they become determined to think more deeply and to share their thinking.

My guess is that there are strong parallels between schools and organisations?