In late 2008 I posted The Best Education-Related Books Visitors To This Blog Read In 2008.
I’d like to do it again this year.
Feel free to leave your recommendations in the comment section of this blog and I’ll hold them in moderation until I print the whole list.
The books could have been published earlier. The only requirement is that you’ve read them sometime this year. They might not be obviously connected to education — just briefly explain how it is connected in your mind.
Please leave the title of the book; author’s name; why you like the book (or books) so much — please keep the explanation to no more than two or three sentences; and how you’d like me to describe you.
Deadline — December 30th.
The best book I came across this year is The Digital Writing Workshop by Troy Hicks. It really grounds the idea of moving students into the digital world of writing and composing in familiar terms, and yet, he provides a framework for moving forward (and the rationale for doing so, too).
http://www.heinemann.com/products/E02674.aspx
Troy has also set up a Ning site that accompanies his book so that teachers can explore and share and reflect together.
http://digitalwritingworkshop.ning.com/
Kevin
PS — Disclosure: Troy is a friend of mine through the National Writing Project and also a contributor to my own book — Teaching the New Writing.
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-New-Writing-Technology-21st-Century/dp/0807749648
Larry,
The best book that I have read is still to be read. Nowadays, many many books are printed, in audio format, and make available in ePub/PDF/Kindle and other ebook formats. But interestingly, authors of educational books overwhelmingly limit the diversity of their publications vehicles. Why? That is the question. Many educators, like me, live in foreign countries. Yes, I live very close to USA here in Mexico … but it might as well be the South Pole, as their or no current books on education .. only the standard Cambridge, Pearson, Richmond, Macmillan stuff.
So I would like for your post (if you agree) to include an open call to authors and publishers to make their materials more widely available via a variety of published formats. It seems ironic that educational books which should be leading the 21st century are the very books that are running behind other genres in terms of technical accessibility. I have asked 2 different authors recently why they have not required that their publishers also distribute their work in ePub/PDF/e-reader open format … and they do not respond. I assume that there must be a reason (less profit margin, fear of copyright infringement, etc.). Other genres don’t seem to constipated in this respect.
So, the best book that I have read is the one that remains unread. With the Kindle/Nook/Sony e-Readers so popular, it just seems out-of-sync with reality and the times. And since Kindle is a proprietary closed format, it really is not all that practical for those of us that want to read on our Macs and other digital devices (Nooks, etc.).
Thanks
Frank
Brain Rules by John Medina
The book describes 12 rules about how the human brain functions well. The insights Medina gives are spot-on, and he has great suggestions for improving learning based on biology and human development.
I am a 3-4 grade teacher in Omaha, Nebraska with an affinity for technology and psychology.
Brain Rules was excellent. A little heavy on evolution theory, but the practical applications for classroom teachers must not be ignored.
I totally agree – the evolution was pretty heavy, but Medina’s practical suggestions are things that I use every single day in my classroom. I have seen first hand some of the benefits of using his ideas.
Crafting Authentic Voice by Tom Romano delighted me. His word choice, examples, and stories leave me wanting more. Who could imagine that a book on writing could be so delicious…
last book by the late Gerald Bracey, Education Hell which does as good a job of presenting the real crisis in education as anything I have seen.
I enjoyed two book this year, both connected by a common thread- educational innovation driven by changes in technology.
The first book is Disrupting Class by Clayton M. Christenson. Disruptive innovation starts as a fringe movement but eventually overtakes the market. Perfect examples include the automobile and digital photography. Christenson argues that Virtual Learning is the disruptive innovation of the day.
Book Ling: http://books.google.com/books?id=wiBcUl44FEcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=disrupting+class&ei=xZIaS6XoKITWNeyg2P8K#v=onepage&q=&f=false
The second book is Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne. This book is written from a business perspective, but easily transfers to education. The “red ocean” is a saturated market where competitors fight against one another. The Blue ocean however belongs to the company that fundimentally changes the marketplace and has uncontested market space. Again, the application is virtual learning. I teach in a private school that is fighting to stay afloat in a challenging economy. We are trying to adopt blue ocean ideas to make our school innovative and unique.
Book Link: http://books.google.com/books?id=fKTllv6_O74C&printsec=frontcover&dq=blue+ocean+strategies&ei=PpMaS6vROJWqMtDekIYL#v=onepage&q=blue%20ocean%20strategies&f=false
The concept of the non-consumer could prove revolutionary/ for public education.
Individualized education for every learner will definitely be here sooner than most educators would like.
Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner. Excellent analysis of the state of education in America today with case studies of schools that are educating for our students future and not our past. Must read for any educator/administrator.
I read this as well, and consider it one of my best education book
this year.
The Interactive Whiteboard Revolution – Teaching with IWBs
The IBW ning is awesome!
http://iwbrevolution.ning.com/
Cool! Glad to see that the effort of writing it was worth it for someone! 🙂 Thanks!
Chris
Oldie but a goodie:
Professional Learning Communities at Work by Richard DuFour and Robert Eakers. Ten years after initial publication, many schools still operate as hierarchical organizations. PLCs at Work casts a new vision for the local school as a community of learners who work collaboratively to ensure learning and achievement for every student.
In progress:
Building Professional Learning Communities at Work by Parry Graham and William Ferriter. Ten years after DuFour and Eaker started the PLC revolution, many administrators and teachers still can’t wrap their minds around the new vision of school as community. Parry and Bill cast the PLC vision in very concrete terms by telling the story of one principal and his staff and their year-long effort to re-form their school into a professional community of learners. Each chapter includes breakdowns of the important concepts and concrete strategies that school leaders can leverage to make the jump from traditional school to PLC.
Frank,
I concur but remain really, really pessimistic that publishers will “decommoditize” knowledge by joining any open resource approach. They are such large and HUGE profit making entities (I know, I have stock!) that it won’t happen until their ability to function is eroded to a significant degree through new sharing / distributing technologies.
I enjoyed Disrupting Class but found some parts just damn boring to slog through. However the parts with actual examples of what’s in the real world were great.
Here’s a book that needs no introduction. Free to print, distribute. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. What reform it calls for, is still to be accomplished 30+ years later. http://www.sicsifim.unina.it/materiale/corsi/DM1_08/da_vincenzo.pdf
David
http://eflclassroom.com
I was inspired by Rafe Esquith’s Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire. It motivated me over the summer to generate some change in how I do business and made teaching more interactive – even for kindergarten.
Larry,
For me, it was a “Our Iceberg is Melting”
Good info here from their website (http://www.ouricebergismelting.com/html/iceberg.html):
A simple fable about doing well in an ever-changing world, “Our Iceberg is Melting” is about a penguin colony in Antarctica. A group of beautiful emperor penguins live as they have for many years. Then one curious bird discovers a potentially devastating problem threatening their home and pretty much no one listens to him.
The characters in the story, Fred, Alice, Louis, Buddy, the Professor, and NoNo, are like people we recognize — even ourselves. Their tale is one of resistance to change and heroic action, seemingly intractable obstacles and the most clever tactics for dealing with those obstacles.
ME: Sound anything like education today?
“Our Iceberg Is Melting” is based on the work of John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber that shows how Eight Steps produce needed change in any sort of group. It’s a story that can be enjoyed by anyone while at the same time providing invaluable guidance for a world that just keeps moving faster and faster.
Best,
Jason Ramsden (@raventech)
The best book I read was Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation. For anyone interested in teaching as a social change profession, Kozol’s work in indispensable.
Although they wasn’t directly education related, there were a couple of books I really enjoyed this year.
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Sirky
A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
Everything is Miscellaneous by Dave Weinberger
I thought that there was a lot of crossover in the ideas contained within these books, and taken together, reading them all was probably a more transformative experience than readning any single one of them.
Thoroughly enjoyed them though!
I’m currently reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and so far have found many of his ideas very interesting and causing me to see things from new viewpoints.
My favorite book was Research-Based Strategies to Ignite Student Learning by Judy Willis, M.D. In this book, Dr. Willis, a neurologist turned classroom teacher, shares her insights into current brain-research and it’s relevance to the way we teach. She teaches the reader innovative strategies for increasing student engagement to improve their overall success in the classroom. I have found it very enlightening!
Why Don’t Students Like School? By Willingham was my favorite “need to think about this more” book. Rafe Esqueth’s Teach Like Your Hair Is On Fire was a good “how to love your students” read.
The best educational book I read this year was Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide. Gallagher, a high school English teacher in California, bluntly describes how traditional instruction in English classes destroys reading for many kids.
This book validated my beliefs about teaching reading and showed that we have a systemic problem, particularly at the secondary level, where it seems teaching books (the canon of classics) is more important (to some teachers) than fostering lifelong literacy behaviors in students.
Geoffrey Canada’s “Fist stick knife gun” and then the book about his very ambitious effort to build a complete educational system for the inner city kids (like himself) from early education into college: “Whatever it Takes.”
Three Cups of Tea – As a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, this amazed me.
Teacher Man by Frank McCourt – I loved it. No prescriptions in this book, just the feel for being a teacher.
Disrupting Class. I know and like the ideas. I think he strung them together nicely. But as a Harvard MBA myself, I don’t like the case-method MBAish writing…..