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.