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As I’ve done every December for the past eight years, I invite readers to share what they think was the best education-related book they read during this calendar year. It doesn’t have to have been published in 2015 — you just have to have read it during the past twelve months.
In addition, please share no more than one or two sentences explaining why you think it was the best one. Please leave the info in the comments section.
You have until December 30th to contribute. As usual, I’ll post the final list, along with who contributed the choices, on New Year’s Day.
There are always a ton of books that get listed, and you can see the posts from previous years here:
The Best Education-Related Books Visitors To This Blog Read In 2014
The Best Education-Related Books Visitors To This Blog Read In 2013
The Best Education-Related Books Visitors To This Blog Read In 2012
The Best Education-Related Books Visitors To This Blog Read In 2011
The Best Education-Related Books Visitors To This Blog Read In 2010
The Best Education-Related Books Visitors To This Blog Read In 2009
The Best Education-Related Books Visitors To This Blog Read In 2008
The best book I read is “The Motivated Brain: Improving Student Attention, Engagement, and Perseverance” by Gayle Gregory, Martha Kaufeldt
Finally got to Mike Schmoker’s Focus. Glad I read it.
A Path Appears by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Amazing book about doing the most good by focusing our time, energy, and money where it will make the most impact. These writers and the amazing people and organizations they discuss leave readers beieving that the world is full of hope and kindness, despite what the media might report.
2015 produced a lot of edu reading that I found challenging, nourishing or affirming. More challenging in places than Headstrong by Dame Sally Coates, more nourishing than John Tomsett’s Love Over Fear and far more affirming than anything else was Flip the System, a collection of essays edited by René Kneyber and Jelmer Evers, and with a range of contributors including Gert Biesta, Tom Bennett, Mark Priestley and Carol Campbell. This book made my summer. It rarely leaves my side. It offers enormous hope that the teaching profession can heal itself, direct itself and monitor itself, in partnership with, but not overshadowed by public authorities. With international contributions, we are taken on many journeys of systems development and layers of emergence of teacher autonomy. The book makes it clear that the progressive-traditional paradigm need not be a dividing issue between teachers, and that school and university level educators have much to share with and learn from one another. This book makes me proud to be a teacher.
This was hard.. I read so many good books this year. In the end there are two, both powerful enough to get hashtags of their own on Twitter; David Daidau’s #WrongBook and #FlipfheSystem. David’s book filled my summer, a slow read while the rain poured down, but Flip the System has been my constant companion ever since I got it and still is, so in the end that is my choice. Get it, read it and let it flip your thinking! Go Flip the System!