My Pending Reading List

These are books I am hoping to read in the next two months. They make a nice, neat stack on my desk. I've started each one and now determined I should finish them.

1. Unlearned Lessons: Six Stumbling Blocks to Our Schools Success by W James Popham

I have a tendency to like books with lists in their titles as a quick way to organize what they want to tell you. I read the first chapter and was captured by the logic of what is being said. This is what Amazon has:

Why is it, writes noted assessment expert W. James Popham, that today s educators seem almost compelled to replicate their predecessors blunders? Looking back over a career of more than fifty years in education, Popham identifies six key unlearned lessons in education and reflects on their impact on schools, teachers, and students.

2. Understanding Youth: Adolescent Development for Educators by Michael Nakkula

This came to my attention via Harvard Review. I read the first two chapters and felt that this book would offer me a lot of insight into the adolescent mind. This is what Amazon has:

An excellent resource for educators, parents, and any adult who seks to understand adolescents and the turbulence and confusion that often affects young people during this period of their lives. A poignant, insightful, and practical analysis. --Pedro Noguera, Professor, New York University

3. The Flickering Mind: Saving Education from the False Promise of Technology by Todd Oppenheimer

I haven't begun this book, but it comes highly recommended to me by educators I respect. That being said, it would seem to be a call for caution for the use of technology in education just at a time I am starting to see real promise. I think it is good to have contradictory voices on such topics. Here is what Amazon has:

“Todd Oppenheimer brings two great strengths to the subject he explores in The Flickering Mind: an understanding of technology’s possibilities and limitations, and an appreciation for the day-by-day realities of the way children learn. He also has a good eye for what is working, and why, in the classroom—and for what is hucksterish in the sales tactics used to promote high-tech learning. The combination makes The Flickering Mind authoritative and original, clear in its main message but also nuanced and fair.” —James Fallows, national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly

4. How Social and Emotional Development Add Up: Getting Results in Math and Science Education

by Norris M. Haynes

Continuing by investigation is the affective environment of math classes, along with the nature of their discourse, to provide the safest possible environment for math learners. Here is what Amazon has:

In today's urban schools, a new approach to teaching math and science is being developed. Teachers are learning that by tending to students' social and emotional well being, they have greater success teaching.

There are two books that I wish EVERYONE related to education would read: parents, educators, administrators:

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge

This book had a huge impact on me this summer. Brain plasticity is a great topic to be developed in today's schools. Here is what Amazon has:

Only a few decades ago, scientists considered the brain to be fixed or "hardwired," and considered most forms of brain damage, therefore, to be incurable. Dr. Doidge, an eminent psychiatrist and researcher, was struck by how his patients' own transformations belied this, and set out to explore the new science of neuroplasticity by interviewing both scientific pioneers in neuroscience, and patients who have benefited from neuro-rehabilitation. Here he describes in fascinating personal narratives how the brain, far from being fixed, has remarkable powers of changing its own structure and compensating for even the most challenging neurological conditions. Doidge's book is a remarkable and hopeful portrait of the endless adaptability of the human brain. -- Oliver Sacks

Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom by Daniel Williams

Perhaps a little more controversial, especially in my professional circles, this author has provocative things to say about the current state of American education. In particular, he talks about how many educators are either too vague, ambiguous or over ambitious with expecting kids to create their own understandings before they are ready. I'm not sure I agree with everything, but I don't discard much of it either. Here is what Amazon has:

Kids are naturally curious, but when it comes to school it seems like their minds are turned off. Why is it that they can remember the smallest details from their favorite television program, yet miss the most obvious questions on their history test?

Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham has focused his acclaimed research on the biological and cognitive basis of learning and has a deep understanding of the daily challenges faced by classroom teachers. This book will help teachers improve their practice by explaining how they and their students think and learn—revealing the importance of story, emotion, memory, context, and routine in building knowledge and creating lasting learning experiences.

In this breakthrough book, Willingham has distilled his knowledge of cognitive science into a set of nine principles that are easy to understand and have clear applications for the classroom. Some of examples of his surprising findings are:

"Learning styles" don't exist The processes by which different children think and learn are more similar than different.

Intelligence is malleable Intelligence contributes to school performance and children do differ, but intelligence can be increased through sustained hard work.

You cannot develop "thinking skills" in the absence of facts We encourage students to think critically, not just memorize facts. However thinking skills depend on factual knowledge for their operation.

Why Don't Students Like School is a basic primer for every teacher who wants to know how their brains and their students' brains work and how that knowledge can help them hone their teaching skills.

Book Report

The Brain That Changes Itself

YOU MUST READ THIS BOOK, teachers and non-teachers alike.

Read this review (from Amazon.com):

It takes a rare talent to explain science to the rest of us. Oliver Sacks is a master at this. So was the late Stephen Jay Gould. A case can be made for John Emsley, one-time science writer in residence at Cambridge, and author, most recently, of Better Looking, Better Living, Better Loving: How Chemistry Can Help You Achieve Life's Goals (2007). 

And now there is Norman Doidge, a psychiatrist who divides his time between Columbia University and the University of Toronto. Four years ago, Doidge set himself the most cerebral of tasks: to understand a concept called neuroplasticity. The brain, far from being a collection of specialized parts, each fixed in its location and function, is in fact a dynamic organ, one that can rewire and rearrange itself as the need arises. That need can arise when the brain is physically damaged, as it is by a stroke, or simply when it is allowed to go to seed, as it has in my case. 

It is an insight from which all of us can benefit. People with severe afflictions -- strokes, cerebral palsy, schizophrenia, learning disabilities, obsessive compulsive disorders and the like -- are the most obvious candidates, but who among us would not like to tack on a few IQ points or improve our memories? 

To benefit from a concept, one must first grasp it, and that is what makes The Brain That Changes Itself such a terrific book. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to read it -- just a person with a curious mind. Doidge is the best possible guide. He has a fluent and unassuming style, and is able to explain difficult concepts without talking down to his readers. 

The case study is the psychiatric literary genre par excellence, and Doidge does not disappoint. There is a woman who manages quite well on just half a brain, an eye surgeon who made a remarkable recovery from a severe stroke, a seven-year-old who had to be taught how to hear pitch, an eight-year-old girl whose autism was holding her back from learning how to speak. Their stories are truly inspirational, and Doidge tells them with great compassion and sensitivity. 

Buy this book. Your brain will thank you. 

-- Jessica Warner, senior scientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health

Library Time

I just received this book in the mail today: Why don't students like school. I have been hearing a lot of buzz around it for some time and look forward to reading it. I suspect there is more than a little controversy around some of the claims.

Book Report

I have been reading "Making Learning Whole" by David Perkins. I love it and wish all teachers would read it. He used the metaphor of the "whole game" to let us know that we can get too caught up in the steps and not the whole pictures. Students become far better learners if they know the whole picture.

Take baseball (as Perkins did). We don't spend hours and hours practicing all the sub routines of the the game before we actually have kids play it. What they do play, though, is what Perkins calls a "junior version" with modified rules, but the overall goal of the game remains the same.

I am contemplated what the "junior version" of algebra should look like for my students thanks to this book.