Reviews of great books
When I started in this field, very few useful books existed. Now we’ve got SO MANY BOOKS that — well — it’s difficult to keep track of them all. Here are some of my favorites, as reviewed over on the Learning and the Brain blog.
You want a step-by-step, SUPER practical guide to improving classroom practice? Check out Walkthrus, by Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli.
I wanted NOT to like Powerful Teaching by Agarwal and Bain, because I was writing a book on this very topic when theirs came out. But it’s a SPLENDID book, and they’re both wonderful people.
If an illustrated guide would be helpful, check out Teaching and Learning Illuminated, by Busch, Watson, and Bogatchek. (Edward Watson is, as far as I know, no relation to me.)
Although Adam Boxer says that his book is about Teaching Secondary Science — that is, in fact, the title — I (and other people I know) think it’s about teaching almost anyone almost anything.
Peps Mccrea’s book boils LOTS of research on Motivation into a briskly readable 80 pages.
Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene focuses his book — How We Learn — on four major steps: attention, active engagement, error feedback, and consolidation.
You can’t really write a book about dual coding, because a “book” usually relis more on words than on pictures. Oliver Caviglioli solves this problem by creating a new genre: Dual Coding.