"George Hillocks offers a powerful and timely lens for understanding the link between instruction and learning. An essential resource for researchers and teachers alike."

–Martin Nystrand, Wisconsin Center for Education Research

"Should help advance our understanding of teacher knowledge and its implications for instructional practice."

–Peter Smagorinsky, University of Georgia

"In this up-close look at schooling, George Hillocks goes to the heart of the matter–pedagogy and teaching in the classroom."

–Miles Myers, former Executive Director of NCTE

Ways of Thinking, Ways of Teaching presents a new model of teacher thinking and action–one that explains teacher decisions about what and how to teach. Combining qualitative and quantitative data drawn from observations and interviews with urban teachers of writing, George Hillocks argues that teacher knowledge is not simply transferred from some source to the teacher. Rather, it is constructed on the basis of assumptions about epistemology, students, and subject matter. The fact of this construction helps to explain why teacher education has had so little effect on changing the classroom behavior of teachers from one generation to the next. Unlike other research on teacher thinking, this book examines what actually happens in composition classrooms, presenting large chunks of representative transcripts for analysis.

George Hillocks, Jr., is a professor in the departments of Education and English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Teaching Writing as Reflective Practice, which won the National Council of Teachers of English 1997 David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English.