For teachers, who rarely set foot in another teacher's classroom, this book offers a chance to slip into other classes and absorb the ethos of each one through honest, detailed, empathic descriptions of the realities of kindergarten teaching. Readers will come away from this book more reflective about their own responses to mistakes and with an expanded repertoire of approaches to giving feedback and, indeed, to creating a learning community.
--Heidi Fessenden, veteran elementary public school teacher and instructional coach
In a richly nuanced and engaging book, Maleka Donaldson paints detailed portraits of how kindergarten teachers respond to their students' mistakes. Situated in public, charter, Montessori, and suburban schools, Donaldson shows how inequitable resources and external pressures shape micro-level classroom dynamics, including how teachers frame and respond to students' mistakes. She also reminds us that teaching is a fundamentally human endeavor and that teacher moment-to-moment decisions have immense power to energize young minds. Everyone who cares about what happens in U.S. classrooms should read this book.
--John B. Diamond, Kellner Family Distinguished Chair in Urban Education and Professor of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison; co-author, Despite the Best Intentions: How Racial Inequality Thrives in Good Schools
In this exceptional book, Maleka Donaldson makes the classroom come alive through her portraits of teachers and their kindergarten students. She offers creative new analyses of teachers' work with children, in the context of their school, community, and the larger policy landscape. From Oops to Aha is a rigorously researched page-turner--an unmistakable must-read for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners alike!
--Nicole Simon, director, City University of New York; research affiliate, Harvard Project on the Next Generation of Teachers
This book is a beautifully-crafted portrait of four Kindergarten teachers whose classrooms differ in both subtle and dramatic ways. Focusing on the teachers' responses to student mistakes, the book highlights the difference between some classrooms where mistakes are used to nurture children's thinking and to carefully steer children to new learning, and others, where mistake-making is embedded in a reward system that sternly demands right answers. By richly describing very different classrooms serving very different populations, Dr. Donaldson forces the reader to consider key equity issues in American schools. From Oops to Ahais a must-read for teacher educators, novice and veteran teachers of small children, and parents of kindergarteners, all of whom will learn an enormous amount about children's learning and instructional diversity from reading this book.
--Katherine C. Boles, retired senior lecturer and program director, Harvard University; co-author, Who's Teaching Your Children, The Power of Teacher Teams, and The Power of Teacher Rounds
