Book picks similar to
What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?: And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies by Alfie Kohn
education
non-fiction
parenting
nonfiction
How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School
John D. Bransford - 1998
This book offers exciting -- and useful -- information about the mind and the brain that provides some answers on how people actually learn.
The Lost Tools of Learning
Dorothy L. Sayers - 1947
It has since been republished countless times due to its sheer eloquence and unanswered articulation of the 3 "lost tools" in classical education: grammar, logic and rhetoric.
The Cornerstone
Angela Watson - 2008
It will guide you through each step of communicating and reinforcing your expectations. Learn how to create a vision for your classroom and TEACH for it!
How To Talk So Kids Can Learn
Adele Faber - 1995
This breakthrough book demonstrates how parents and teachers can join forces to inspire kids to be self-directed, self-disciplined, and responsive to the wonders of learning.
Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?
Pasi Sahlberg - 2011
The author traces the evolution of education policies in Finland and highlights how they differ from the United States and other industrialized countries. He shows how rather than relying on competition, choice, and external testing of students, education reforms in Finland focus on professionalizing teachers' work, developing instructional leadership in schools, and enhancing trust in teachers and schools. This book details the complexity of educational change and encourages educators and policymakers to develop effective solutions for their own districts and schools.
Talk to Me: Find the Right Words to Inspire, Encourage, and Get Things Done
Kim Bearden - 2018
Embedded Formative Assessment - practical strategies and tools for K-12 teachers
Dylan Wiliam - 2011
Dylan Wiliam faces this challenge head-on by making a case for the important role of formative assessment in increasing teacher quality and student learning. While there are many possible ways in which we could seek to develop the practice of serving teachers, attention to minute-by-minute and day-to-day formative assessment is likely to have the biggest impact on student outcomes. Wiliam s view of formative assessment differs from the popular view in that he regards formative assessment as a process rather than a tool.Wiliam outlines what formative assessment is, and what it is not, and presents the five key strategies of formative assessment:1. Clarifying, sharing, and understanding learning intentions and criteria for success2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, activities, and learning tasks that elicit evidence of learning3. Providing feedback that moves learning forward4. Activating learners as instructional resources for one another5. Activating learners as owners of their own learningThe book presents a summary of the research evidence that shows the impact of each strategy and offers a number of practical techniques that teachers have used to incorporate the strategy into their regular classroom practice.
Raising Lifelong Learners: A Parent's Guide
Lucy Calkins - 1997
Drawing upon her influential philosophy of active learning, as well as her personal experience as a parent, Calkins shows parents how to stimulate curiosity and spark creative thinking in children. Having an open and creative approach to conversations, chores, and games can matter just as much as reading, writing, and math. And even in traditional skills like reading and writing, we need to encourage our children to read for meaning and write for expression, rather than focus only on mechanics like phonics and spelling.By giving parents new and imaginative techniques for educating children, and by providing them with an insider's view of what goes on in the early grades, Raising Lifelong Learners creates the ultimate partnership in learning between home and school, parents and teachers.
Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions
Dan Rothstein - 2011
They also argue that it should be taught in the simplest way possible. Drawing on twenty years of experience, the authors present the Question Formulation Technique, a concise and powerful protocol that enables learners to produce their own questions, improve their questions, and strategize how to use them.Make Just One Change features the voices and experiences of teachers in classrooms across the country to illustrate the use of the Question Formulation Technique across grade levels and subject areas and with different kinds of learners.
The Growth Mindset Coach: A Teacher's Month-by-Month Handbook for Empowering Students to Achieve
Annie Brock - 2016
The Growth Mindset Coach provides all you need to foster a growth mindset classroom, including:A Month-by-Month ProgramResearch-Based ActivitiesHands-On Lesson PlansReal-Life Educator StoriesConstructive FeedbackSample Parent LettersStudies show that growth mindsets result in higher test scores, improved grades and more in-class involvement. When your students understand that their intelligence is not limited, they succeed like never before. With the tools in this book, you can motivate your students to believe in themselves and achieve anything.
Overcoming Dyslexia: A New and Complete Science-Based Program for Reading Problems at Any Level
Sally E. Shaywitz - 2003
Now a world-renowned expert gives us a substantially updated and augmented edition of her classic work: drawing on an additional fifteen years of cutting-edge research, offering new information on all aspects of dyslexia and reading problems, and providing the tools that parents, teachers, and all dyslexic individuals need. This new edition also offers:- New material on the challenges faced by dyslexic individuals across all ages - Rich information on ongoing advances in digital technology that have dramatically increased dyslexics' ability to help themselves - New chapters on diagnosing dyslexia, choosing schools and colleges for dyslexic students, the co-implications of anxiety, ADHD, and dyslexia, and dyslexia in post-menopausal women - Extensively updated information on helping both dyslexic children and adults become better readers, with a detailed home program to enhance reading - Evidence-based universal screening for dyslexia as early as kindergarten and first grade - why and how - New information on how to identify dyslexia in all age ranges - Exercises to help children strengthen the brain areas that control reading - Ways to raise a child's self-esteem and reveal her strengths - Stories of successful men, women, and young adults who are dyslexic
The Importance of Being Little: What Preschoolers Really Need from Grownups
Erika Christakis - 2016
But our fears are misplaced, according to Yale early childhood expert Erika Christakis. Children are powerful and inventive; and the tools to reimagine their learning environment are right in front of our eyes. Children are hardwired to learn in any setting, but they don’t get the support they need when “learning” is defined by strict lessons and dodgy metrics that devalue children’s intelligence while placing unfit requirements on their developing brains. We have confused schooling with learning, and we have altered the very habitat young children occupy. The race for successful outcomes has blinded us to how young children actually process the world, acquire skills, and grow, says Christakis, who powerfully defends the preschool years as a life stage of inherent value and not merely as preparation for a demanding or uncertain future. In her pathbreaking book, Christakis explores what it’s like to be a young child in America today, in a world designed by and for adults. With school-testing mandates run amok, playfulness squeezed, and young children increasingly pathologized for old-fashioned behaviors like daydreaming and clumsiness, it’s easy to miss what’s important about the crucial years of three to six, and the kind of guidance preschoolers really need. Christakis provides a forensic and far-reaching analysis of today’s whole system of early learning, exploring pedagogy, history, science, policy, and politics. She also offers a wealth of proven strategies about what to do to reimagine the learning environment to suit the child’s real, but often invisible, needs. The ideas range from accommodating children’s sense of time, to decluttering classrooms, to learning how to better observe and listen as children express themselves in pictures and words. With her strong foundation in the study of child development and early education and her own in-the-trenches classroom experience, Christakis peels back the mystery of early childhood, revealing a place that’s rich with possibility. Her message is energizing and reassuring: Parents have more power (and more knowledge) than they think they do, and young children are inherently creative and will flourish, if we can learn new ways to support them and restore their vital learning habitat.
Wounded by School: Recapturing the Joy in Learning and Standing Up to Old School Culture
Kirsten Olson - 2009
Ironically, today's schooling is damaging the single most essential component to education--the joy of learningHow do we recognize the wounds caused by outdated schooling policies? How do we heal them? In her controversial new book, education writer and critic Kirsten Olson brings to light the devastating consequences of an educational approach that values conformity over creativity, flattens students' interests, and dampens down differences among learners. Drawing on deeply emotional stories, Olson shows that current institutional structures do not produce the kinds of minds and thinking that society really needs. Instead, the system tends to shame, disable, and bore many learners. Most importantly, she presents the experiences of wounded learners who have healed and shows what teachers, parents, and students can do right now to help themselves stay healthy.
Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters
Robert Probst - 2017
Now, in Disrupting Thinking they take teachers a step further and discuss an on-going problem: lack of engagement with reading. They explain that all too often, no matter the strategy shared with students, too many students remain disengaged and reluctant readers. The problem, they suggest, is that we have misrepresented to students why we read and how we ought to approach any text - fiction or nonfiction. With their hallmark humor and their appreciated practicality, Beers and Probst present a vision of what reading and what education across all the grades could be. Hands-on-strategies make it applicable right away for the classroom teacher, and turn-and-talk discussion points make it a guidebook for school-wide conversations. In particular, they share new strategies and ideas for helping classroom teachers:–Create engagement and relevance–Encourage responsive and responsible reading–Deepen comprehension–Develop lifelong reading habits“We think it’s time we finally do become a nation of readers, and we know it’s time students learn to tell fake news from real news. It’s time we help students understand why how they read is so important,” explain Beers and Probst. “Disrupting Thinking is, at its heart, an exploration of how we help students become the reader who does so much more than decode, recall, or choose the correct answer from a multiple-choice list. This book shows us how to help students become the critical thinkers our nation needs them to be." Includes online resource bank.
Teaching with the Brain in Mind
Eric Jensen - 1998
Now, author Eric Jensen is back with a completely revised and updated edition of his classic work, featuring new research and practical strategies to enhance student comprehension and improve student achievement.In easy to understand, engaging language, Jensen provides a basic orientation to the brain and its various systems and explains how they affect learning. After discussing what parents and educators can do to get children's brains in good shape for school, Jensen goes on to explore topics such as motivation, critical thinking skills, optimal educational environments, emotions, and memory. He offers fascinating insights on a number of specific issues, including * How to tap into the brain's natural reward system. * The value of feedback. * The importance of prior knowledge and mental models. * The vital link between movement and cognition. * Why stress impedes learning. * How social interaction affects the brain. * How to boost students' ability to encode, maintain, and retrieve learning. * Ways to connect brain research to curriculum, assessment, and staff development.Jensen's repeated message to educators is simple: You have far more influence on students' brains than you realize . . . and you have an obligation to take advantage of the incredible revelations that science is providing. The revised and updated edition of Teaching with the Brain in Mind helps you do just that.