Taylor Jon. The Minimax Teacher

DELTA publishing, 2001. - 96 p.
Series Professional Perspectives
ISBN10: 0953309894
ISBN13: 978-0953309894
The Minimax Teacher, part of the Professional Perspectives series, shows teachers how to increase learning efficiency through both a general approach to good learning management and a wealth of ready-to-use activities.
The Minimax Teacher focuses on increasing learning efficiency by:
reducing teacher input,
encouraging greater student involvement,
freeing teachers to focus on key areas such as monitoring and feedback
Ever spent hours preparing materials and activities only to have them last a few minutes in the classroom ? Ever felt that the teacher is doing far too much of the work yet seen at the same time the students are sitting there unchallenged and uninvolved ? Ever realised it's you who's doing most of the talking in the classroom ? If you have (or have seen/ heard of a class where this has happened), this is a book for you.
The central idea behind the Minimax Teacher (Jon Taylor) is that teachers need to minimise input i.e. preparation time and energy spent in the classroom and maximinise output i.e. making the students produce more by involving and engaging them in the classroom. These are principles which any hard-working teacher would fully endorse both for their own and for their students' benefit!
An engaging introduction where Jon Taylor describes examples of teachers overloading themselves and underloading the students is followed by a series of extremely useful insights such as "A squash coach is a true MINIMAX artist, taking two steps to send the pupils running all over the court. They wouldn't learn half as much just by watching , so they do most of the work, pay for the lesson and thank the coach. " (p.g. 7) , or "You don't need the practice as much as they do…Teachers frequently fill the silences which, in fact, represent thinking space for learners." (p.g. 7) and by the 10 MINIMAX principles which cover essential ideas like "Put the focus on the students" (no 3, p.g. 10) which reminds us to step back and take a less central role from time to time , "Share correction" (no 7, p.g. 11) which encourages peer correction and "Respect your students as people " with justly proclaims that " Learners are not empty vessels to be filled with knowledge from the teacher, or a restless, passive audience to be entertained by the teacher." All of these are words of wisdom and well worth pondering…
The book is then divided into six chapters : Starting Off, Personalisation, Student-generated activities, Exploiting Materials, Inspiring Writing, and Dealing with Diversity.
Each chapter has a brief but thought-provoking description of the thinking behind the principle laid out under different headings and includes extremely useful bullet points and hints. This introduction is then followed by a series of activities - 87 in all - each provided with a complete description and step-by-step procedure.
A lot of these activities are time-honoured classroom favourites like mingles, brainstorming, Drawing Quiz (a.k.a. "Pictionary") , dictations, lateral thinking puzzles etc. Others, such as the ideas for Exploiting Materials may not be as well-known. For example, the idea of getting students to do a quiz about the coursebook's contents and layout is very nice. This section provides some very useful hints for making the most of a coursebook without recurring to photocopies but I felt that at some point more mention could have been made of resources like the Internet and newspapers, especially as these can be