Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve taught Philosophy graduate students at the same time as assisting in kindergartens when my kids were in community co-op schools... staging both classes the same way. Proud to be named Elon University’s 2002 Teacher of the Year, I have led classes “on the edge” ranging from “Millennial Imagination” and “Life in the Universe” (students just called it “Aliens”) to a Philosophy of Education course taught with a totally different pedagogy – embodying a different philosophy – every single session. I also work in environmental philosophy and am deeply involved in designing and building Common Ground Ecovillage in central North Carolina.


I wrote

Teaching as the Art of Staging: A Scenario-Based College Pedagogy in Action

By Anthony Weston,

Book cover of Teaching as the Art of Staging: A Scenario-Based College Pedagogy in Action

What is my book about?

What I call “Impresarios with Scenarios” are teachers who make themselves class mobilizers, improvisers, and energizers, setting up self-unfolding learning…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The School And Society

Anthony Weston Why did I love this book?

An even-tempered yet provocative sketch of the philosophy and design of a school “where actual & literal constructive activity shall be the center & source of the whole thing”... as when history students in Dewey’s experimental elementary school in effect recreate the industrial revolution, for instance reinventing crude cotton gins and looms and eventually even making some of their own clothes. What school could be! Dewey’s vision (first published in 1899!) is still radical (alas) and still topical and richly suggestive to scenario-staging pedagogy today.

By John Dewey,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The School And Society as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Title 'The School and Society written/authored/edited by John Dewey', published in the year 2017.


Book cover of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College

Anthony Weston Why did I love this book?

The founder of “Reacting to the Past” pedagogy offers both a theoretical rationale for, and touching and astonishing narratives from, “Reacting’s” trademark: month-long historical role-playing games that place college students into specific “roles informed by classic texts in the history of ideas”, culminating in open-ended reenactments of classic confrontations or historical watersheds like the trial of Galileo and the US Constitutional Convention. Students devour massive prep manuals; the events themselves are utterly absorbing, often with “moments of heart-stopping intensity”; and the thrills spill over into every moment of students’ lives (other school staff actually complain about this) and live on for years afterwards. (Cf. Model UN)

By Mark C. Carnes,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Minds on Fire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year

In Minds on Fire, Mark C. Carnes shows how role-immersion games channel students' competitive (and sometimes mischievous) impulses into transformative learning experiences. His discussion is based on interviews with scores of students and faculty who have used a pedagogy called Reacting to the Past, which features month-long games set during the French Revolution, Galileo's trial, the partition of India, and dozens of other epochal moments in disciplines ranging from art history to the sciences. These games have spread to over three hundred campuses around the world, where many of their benefits defy…


Book cover of Six Thinking Hats

Anthony Weston Why did I love this book?

Officially “Six Hats” is a framework for group decision-making, marking out the major types of consideration (what are the facts? the dangers? how do we feel about this?...) into six roles denoted by differently colored hats. But the classroom impresario will immediately recognize it as a ready-made method for staging those hoary (and problematic) old “class discussions” in far more energetic and widely participatory forms. The genius is to give each participant a pre-made place to speak from, and to make it visible and compelling. Bring on the hats! as my students would say.

By Edward de Bono,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Six Thinking Hats as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Used successfully by thousands of business managers, educators, and government leaders around the world, Six Thinking Hats offers a practical and uniquely positive approach to making decisions and exploring new ideas.

Your success in business depends on how you think. "The main difficulty of thinking is confusion," writes Edward de Bono, long recognized as the foremost international authority on conceptual thinking and on the teaching of thinking as a skill. "We try to do too much at once. Emotions, information, logic, hope, and creativity all crowd in on us. It is like juggling with too many balls." The solution? De…


Book cover of Theatre of the Oppressed

Anthony Weston Why did I love this book?

Inspired by Paolo Freire’s classic Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian dramatist and activist Augusto Boal makes active participants of audiences, staging oppressive interactions and then repeatedly re-staging them as “spect-actors” step up to intervene and remake the interaction. Anyone can join! A stunning synergy of empowering revolutionary theater and improvisational role-playing that has not even begun to be adapted to classrooms. You figure out why. Then figure out how to adapt and bring it on now.

By Augusto Boal, Charles A. McBride (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Theatre of the Oppressed as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"Boal and his work are marvelous examples of the post-modern situation-its problems and its opportunities. Twice exiled, Boal is 'at home' now wherever he finds himself to be. He makes a skeptical, comic, inquisitive and finally optimistic theatre involving spectators and performers in the search for community and integrity. This is a good book to be used even more than to be read." - Richard Schechner

"Augusto Boal's achievement is so remarkable, so original and so groundbreaking that I have no hesitation in describing the book as the most important theoretical work in the theatre in modern times - a…


Book cover of Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better

Anthony Weston Why did I love this book?

Holt writes that the best learning experience in his life wasn’t a “learning experience” at all, but serving on a submarine during World War 2. Success – and sheer survival – manifestly hinged on quickly bringing even the rawest and supposedly least educable of the crew to function at the highest level. In such purposive settings, everything about “teaching and learning” is different. School as we know it, Holt argues, is hypocrisy-inducing and soul-crushing, plus stupendously inefficient, but you can take this angry book as also a provocation to rethink pedagogy in a radical but still constructive way... even in, yes, something like school.

By John Holt,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Instead of Education as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Instead of Education is Holt's most direct and radical challenge to the educational status quo and a clarion call to parents to save their children from schools of all kinds. In this breakthrough work Holt lays out the foundation for un-schooling as the vital path to self-directed learning and a creative life.


Explore my book 😀

Teaching as the Art of Staging: A Scenario-Based College Pedagogy in Action

By Anthony Weston,

Book cover of Teaching as the Art of Staging: A Scenario-Based College Pedagogy in Action

What is my book about?

What I call “Impresarios with Scenarios” are teachers who make themselves class mobilizers, improvisers, and energizers, setting up self-unfolding learning challenges and adventures – off-beat and unexpected problems, unscripted dramas or role-plays, simulations that might take ten minutes or maybe a whole term – provoking and trusting students to run with them. Illustrated by detailed narratives from my own practice as well as others’, here is a conceptual framework as well as class-planning strategies for “teaching as staging”, in multiple settings and across the disciplines, differing sharply not just from “teaching as telling” but also from the supposedly opposite model of the teacher as facilitator or coach “guiding on the side”. Everyone active, no one on the side!

Book cover of The School And Society
Book cover of Minds on Fire: How Role-Immersion Games Transform College
Book cover of Six Thinking Hats

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No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

By Rona Simmons,

Book cover of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

Rona Simmons Author Of No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”

Rona's book list on World War II featuring the average Joe

What is my book about?

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.

The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.

No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…

No Average Day: The 24 Hours of October 24, 1944

By Rona Simmons,

What is this book about?

October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…


5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in theatres, Eastern philosophy, and thinking?

Theatres 79 books
Thinking 48 books