The Teachers' RESET!
Drop the Ineffective, Traumatizing Teaching Methods. Learn a New, Effective Way to Communicate and Educate! (While Preserving Your Sanity)
The Teachers’ RESET! is a heartfelt education guide that gathers hard-won tips for aspirational educators.
Cia Rae Blake’s teachers’ resource guide The Teachers’ RESET! proposes strategies for connecting better with students.
Drawing on a novel combination of training and career experiences, including those as a music teacher and a hypnotherapist, Blake shares five steps for educators to reset their understandings of themselves and their students. These five steps organize the five parts of the book: learning to get clarity, learning to observe, learning to respond, learning to apply new skills, and learning to stay sane. Each step is described using classroom examples from Blake’s long teaching career and is grounded in the fields Blake studied.
Seeking clarity, the first step, involves learning to quiet one’s assumptions and listen to the student rather than reaching for easy labels and opinions. Learning to observe students as they are rather than as teachers imagine them is the second step, addressed using a homegrown taxonomy of learning and memory styles. These are useful leaping-off points for educators to ponder, even if they are not supported internally by research. Still, they are delivered with the confidence of experience, imbuing each category with a degree of clarity.
Some of the book’s suggestions are directed at teachers in the K-12 system, as with a rumination on the dangers of standardized testing and how competitive students who don’t receive adequate support might struggle with feelings of failure. In contrast, its tips on how to prepare for the volatile situation of performance are applicable to a wide variety of settings, since many fields and careers involve high-stakes moments. And its observations about leadership and empathy apply to many situations as well, underscoring its organizing principle: that tuning into the present moment is one of the best tools in a teacher’s toolkit.
The hypnotherapy piece stands out: it’s a topic not often discussed in mainstream education circles. The book capitalizes on this novelty, narrating anecdotes from Blake’s training and sharing tips on ethical practices. It asserts that the hypnotherapy and teaching disciplines are not as far apart as they might seem; both aim to exert a positive influence on the patient or student, and thus teachers might benefit from learning some of these techniques to utilize in the classroom. Here and elsewhere, optimism flavors the work, with many exclamation points concluding sentences. And the book’s short sections are digestible and easy to read, using direct language and touches of humor.
The Teachers’ RESET! is a heartfelt education guide that gathers hard-won tips for educators who are looking to add skills to their arsenal of decoding student behaviors.
Reviewed by
Jeana Jorgensen
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
