Books: Best Places to Start
Welcome to the Field
Dan Willingham introduced a generation of teachers (including me) to cognitive psychology. Why Don’t Students Like School? asks and answers several key questions: for example, “What’s the secret to getting students to think like real scientists, mathematicians, and historians?” He explains complex concepts clearly, and offers practical classroom strategies to help students learn.
Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher — classroom teachers both — helped found one of the most important organizations that applies the science of learning in schools and classrooms. They also co-wrote Neuroteach: Brain Science and the Future of Education. This book welcomes teachers to the field with both research chops and classroom experience.
Learning and Memory
Happily, we have several excellent books in this field.
If you’d like to learn more about the ideas and research behind Powerful Teaching, I recommend make it stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel. (Yes, the title is all lower case. No, I don’t know why.) They review research paradigms in surprisingly lively detail.
Equally good is How We Learn by Benedict Carey. As a science writer for the New York Times, Carey knows how to tell a good story—and with this research, he’s got a great story to tell.
For a different approach to memory, you might read The Perpetual Now by Michael D. Lemonick. He tells the story of a famous artist—Lonni Sue Johnson, whose work you’ve seen in the New Yorker—whose hippocampi were destroyed by meningitis. Unable to convert new experience into long-term memory, Johnson—like the famous H. M. before her—lives always in the present. Lemonick tells her story, and the truths about memory that researchers have gleaned from her experience.
Adolescence
Both adolescence and adolescents are super complicated. Happily, teachers and parents can rely on several wonderful books for guidance and comfort.
Untangled, by Lisa Damour, considers seven transitions from childhood to adulthood: for instance, the ever-popular “Contending with Adult Authority.” (Trust me: it’s a good thing.) With her experience as a college professor, K-12 school counselor, family therapist, and parent, Damour has all the perspective – and humor – necessary to clarify this subject. Although written for parents of girls, the research and guidance quite often applies to boys as well.
Inventing Ourselves, by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, rests on this premise: adolescents are not broken adults. They’re doing essential developmental work necessary for the transition from childhood to adulthood. As one of the key researchers in this field, Blakemore knows the essential points thoroughly, and explains them with clarity and humor. She’s reasonable, practical, and wonderfully well-informed.
Attention
Here’s a title to get your attention: The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Authors Gazzaley and Rosen combine their expertise in psychology and neuroscience to explain how and why we’re our attention is so easily lured astray. They rely—believe it or not—on “foraging theory” to explain their ideas. Their suggestions don’t break new ground, but their conceptual framework for understanding distraction can be mightily helpful.
Exercise
Lots of people have written about the benefits of exercise for learning; no doubt much has changed since 2008. But, John Ratey’s Spark is still the best book in know on “the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain.” Ratey explains both the underlying neurobiological mechanisms (think “myelin”) and the school and classroom strategies that might promote the right kind of neural change.
Evolution
Paul Howard-Jones explores the Evolution of the Learning Brain in this book, with the marvelous subtitle: How You Got to Be So Smart. Howard-Jones explains the evolution of many different learning systems that we still rely on today. This fascinating story offers a few specific teaching insights; more broadly, it helps us think about our work from a fresh and eye-opening perspective.
How to Study
Few teams are better qualified to write a book on studying well than the Learning Scientists. If you know a student (high school or older) looking for such a book, I recommend Ace That Test by Sumeracki, Nebel, Kuepper-Tetzel, and Kaminske.
Specific Topics
Sarah Cottingham is just too wise. She’s written a short, splendid book about Ausubel’s Meaningful Learning theory. At just over 100 pages, it packs a punch.
Likewise, the wife and husband team Zoe and Mark Enser have outlined Fiorella and Mayer’s Generative Learning theory. This short book summarizes the evidence and specific techniques.
I myself have an unusual take on cognitive load theory. I think it’s likely to be mostly true; I also think it’s too complicated and jargony to be useful for most people. If, however, you’d like the most straightforward explanation possible, check out Cognitive Load Theory in Action, by Oliver Lovell.
Strong Opinions
Education can be a fad-driven field, but Daisy Christodoulou is having none of it. Having been trained in fads, and forced to teach with fads, she started looking into the research behind them. The result: Seven Myths of Education, a book with a higher mic-drop-per-chapter ratio than any I’ve read in ages. Her conclusions may well discomfort readers, but her logic and thoroughness are hard to beat.