My New Book on Nondirective Teaching: Everything from Course Design to Assessment with Carl Rogers

 

Based in part in the popularity that my entries on nondirective teaching have been on here, I decided to catalog my understanding and practice as it occurs Summer and Fall of 2025. It is available in paperback and eBook (free with Kindle Unlimited) on Amazon. If you are in the US, then here is a link you can use.

Nondirective teaching is about creating an environment that makes learning as easy on students as possible. This is literally what "learning facilitation" means--that is, making learning easy. Learning is a very complicated process and it asks much of the learner--namely, that they become a different person by transforming how they see, understand, or interact with the world. Nondirective teaching is focused on how to make this as easy on students as possible.

I'll come out and admit that the term "nondirective teaching" is a bit of a misnomer, because there isn't any teaching involved. I don't give students the objectives or judge how well they do. I'm just there to learn and think alongside students, and solve problems together with them. Still, there isn't much recognition for synonyms such as "student-directed learning" or "Nonteaching."

I break the book up like this:

In Part I, I describe the philosophical and theoretical foundations of nondirective teaching. In it I describe the goals behind nondirective teaching and some of the shortcomings of teacher-directed learning. I also take head-on the critique that nondirective teaching DOESN'T WORK.

In Part II, I summarize Carl Roger's approach to facilitating learning. I give a few examples of courses he taught over the years, and I emphasize the three attitudes for any helping relationships, attitudes that he spent his career defining, testing, and sharing. The attitudes are congruence, empathy, and unconditional positive regard.

In Part III, I show how nondirective teaching has played out in my own college classrooms where I have been using it for the past decade or so. I've taught undergraduate and graduate students, small seminars and large lecture halls. Online and face to face. I describe how nondirective teaching changes in each of these contexts, and I show how it worked (and cases in which it doesn't seem to work). 

There are also chapters in Part III about how to adapt nondirective teaching at schools where faculty have little flexibility or in programs with predetermined learning objectives.