Book Reviews – Page 5 – Education & Teacher Conferences

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Teaching Minds & Brains: the Best Books to Read

Andrew Watson

September-05-2022

Teaching Minds & Brains: the Best Books to Read

When I started in this field, back in 2008, we all HUNGERED for good books.

After all, teaching is profoundly complicated.

And, psychology is mightily complicated.

And, neuroscience is fantastically (unbearably?) complicated.

If we’re going to put those three fields together — and that is, after all, the goal — we need authors who know a great deal about three complicated fields.

These authors need to know enough to synthesize those fields, and explain that synthesis clearly. Can it even be done?

Back in 2008, the goal seemed unreachable…

Places to Start

Since then, the publishing pace has started to pick up. In fact, we now face the reverse problem: too many good books.

My stack of “I must read these RIGHT NOW or I will lose all credibility” books gets taller by the week.

Where to begin?

Long-time readers know one of my mantras:

Don’t just do this thing; instead, think this way.

Applied to book recommendations, that mantra becomes:

I shouldn’t just recommend individual books; instead, I should suggest helpful categories of books.

So, these three categories seem most helpful to me.

Getting Specific

When authors combine teaching, psychology, and neuroscience, they can focus their interest on one specific topic.

This approach has lots of benefits. In particular, one-topic books can explore the field in depth, give lots of classroom examples, delve into critical nuances.

So, for instance, if you’d like to learn more about long-term memory formation, you won’t do much better that Powerful Teaching by Agarwal and Bain.

Carol Dweck’s book on Mindset is, of course, a classic in the motivation field. But: if you want to explore motivation more substantially, you really should know Peps Mccrea’s Motivated Teaching.

How about adolescence? I’m a big fan of Lisa Damour’s Untangled: wise, practical, funny, humane.

Blog readers certainly know that working memory deserves all the attention it can get. Ollie Lovell’s recent Cognitive Load Theory in Action makes this theoretical approach as concrete as possible. (My own book Learning Begins focuses on working memory without the cognitive load theory framework.)

You might even want to know about the role of evolution in this field. Paul Howard-Jones’s Evolution of the Learning Brain is a delightful and informative read.

Ready for More

These books — and MANY more — explore one topic in depth.

However, you might be ready to put all those small pieces together. These authors consider the individual pieces (attention, stress, evolution, working memory), and try to build them together into a coherent picture.

The first of these put-the-pieces-together books, of course, is Dan Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School.

The first book of its kind for a general audience, WDSLS? boils all those topics above into several core principles: “factual knowledge must precede skill” or most famously, “memory is the residue of thought.”

Now in its third edition, this book offers splendid and friendly guidance for those of us who want psychology (and some neuroscience) research to guide our thinking.

You might pick up How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene. (This book is so good, our blog published two separate reviews of it.) Dehaene considers “Four Pillars” of learning, and how they work together support students’ progress.

Being careful not to confuse the titles, you might also grab Understanding How We Learn, by Weinstein and Sumeracki. These two scholars founded The Learning Scientists, a consistently excellent source of online wisdom in this field.

If you’d rather read a synthesis book by classroom teachers (rather than university professors), Neuroteach by Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher provides all the scholarly background knowledge combined with a teacher’s practical insights.

All these books — and others like them — unite various topics into a coherent and thoughtful system.

Build Your Own Adventure

The first category of book explores one topic in depth. The second category puts several topics together in a coherent, unified structure.

The third category provides the individual pieces (like the first category) and lets the reader synthesize them (like the second category).

I think of two major players in this field.

Back in 2019, Bradley Busch and Edward Watson (no relation that I know of) published The Science of Learning. This book — and a follow-up volume — offers 2-page summaries of 77 studies in several core topics: metacognition, parents, memory, and so forth.

Busch and Watson, in effect, provide teachers many vital building blocks. We can then use those blocks to build our own structures — that is, our own synthesis.

Each of us is our own Dan Willingham.

In 2020, Paul Kirschner and Carl Hendrick published How Learning Happens: Seminal Works in Educational Psychology and What They Mean in Practice.

As the title suggests, this volume explores 25+ papers making foundational arguments about the intersection of psychology and teaching.

How can we invite students to think more deeply? What is the role of elaboration? Why and how should we make thinking visible? Kirschner and Hendrick explore those questions by carefully summarizing and unpacking the most important papers investigating them.

Earlier this year, Jim Heal joined Kirschner and Hendrick to publish How TEACHING Happens, looking at similar questions for teachers and teaching.

Here again, we teachers can use these building blocks to build our own synthesis.

My synthesis might not look like yours.

But that’s okay: I’m a high school English teacher; you might be a 2nd grade reading specialist; whereas he might be a college music theory professor. We need (slightly) different syntheses, because we do different things, and are different people.

Where to Begin?

I suspect that the best place to begin depends on your prior knowledge. (Of course, almost all learning depends on prior knowledge.)

If you’re new-ish to the field, probably single-topic books will give you the biggest bang for your reading buck.

You won’t learn everything about the field, but you will know enough about one topic to make real progress.

Once you’ve got a good foundation laid, I think the synthesis books will offer lots of wisdom.

After all, teachers need to think about attention AND memory AND stress AND development. If I have some prior knowledge about most of those topics, I’ll have some real chance to understand how Willingham (and Dehaene, and Weinstein/Sumeracki, and Whitman/Kelleher) put those ideas together.

Or, perhaps you’re more of a choose-your-own-adventure reader. If you like the cognitive quest of building your own castle, these books (Busch/Watson, Kirschner/Hendrick/Heal) give you the very best research bricks to build with.

And, honestly, at some point, we all need to do this synthesis work ourselves. That is: we all need to build our individually tailored models.

Because we teach different curricula to different age groups in different cultural contexts, we will draw more on some kind of research than others.

And, of course, our students might have different learning profiles. And, of course, each of us has our own strengths and muddles in the classroom.

In other words: I suspect we all need to start by studying specific topics. And, someday, we will all be grateful for the books that help us create our own unique syntheses.

Author’s confession: I could EASILY double the length of this post by including more books I love and admire. I’m trying to give a useful sample; in doing so, I’m inevitably leaving out lots of splendid texts.

Perhaps in the comments you can add your own favorite book!

Erik Jahner, PhD

August-26-2022

Future Tense by Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

Being that approximately 20% of US adults have reported having an anxiety disorder in the last year, and many more have experienced situational anxiety which they are trying to reduce, Tracy Dennis-Tiwary suggests it is time for us to redefine our relationship with anxiety. The thrust of Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad) is that we need to shift our mindset concerning anxiety: anxiety is not a health crisis, but the way we cope with anxiety can be and the ways we cope with anxiety are missed opportunities for growth and productivity.

As someone who has been managing anxiety for many years, I found this book incredibly useful in that it helped reframe some of the beliefs I hold about anxiety even though I have read widely on the topic. The author approaches this reframing from a variety of perspectives from evolution and neuroscience to the social history of the terminology and diagnoses. She deconstructs our modern views on anxiety, helps us understand how these views have emerged, and helps us reconstruct our relationship with this emotional feeling. The experience of anxiety is framed by our cultural context and place in history, and we are capable of reframing the way we interact with the contexts and shifting our experience.

The research presented here also helps to clarify research and undo common misunderstandings. In particular, she brings awareness to the idea that anxiety is not a simple basic emotion, but a complex one that integrates multiple cortical areas and occurs through a complicated interaction of fear and reasoning. It is here, in this interaction, that we are able to exercise some executive control that can either make the anxiety functional or dysfunctional. She also points to the importance of human connection in scaffolding the way we channel this executive control.

The discussions on parenting and electronic media are particularly enlightening and display a real connection with the reader. There are so many broad generalizations in our social interactions about the impact of electronic media on our emotional state and misleading suggestions for parenting, but Tracy offers a critical look into these as well. She explains the weakness of some of our popular arguments through descriptions of her personal experiences as she came to understand her anxieties and the anxieties of those around her better.

The text is emotionally engaging while intellectually rigorous as Tracy does an excellent job of interweaving research with both her personal stories as well as our shared experience surviving the pandemic and the current political upheavals. We come to understand how she has experienced anxiety in her life the dynamics of the experience and through past, present, and future reflections. Similarly, the studies presented are done in a way that allows us to participate in thinking about how we have undergone or might react in similar situations. Keeping with the trend of the book she helps us notice our current behavior and mindset and then walks us through potential alternative exercises. The studies she presents encourage reflection making the science accessible.

This book was a quick weekend read that takes you on an intellectual and emotional journey. It will help you not only understand yourself better but also better understand the age we live in by looking at how our approaches to anxiety are woven into our cultural dynamics today.

The Best Book on Cognitive Load Theory: Ollie Lovell to the Rescue

Andrew Watson

August-07-2022

The Best Book on Cognitive Load Theory: Ollie Lovell to the Rescue

Teaching ought to be easy.

After all, we have a functionally infinite amount of long-term memory. You don’t have to forget one thing to learn another thing — really.

So: I should be able to shovel information and skills into your infinite long-term memory. Voila! You’d know everything

Alas, to get to your long-term memory, “information and skills” have to pass through your working memory. This very narrow bottleneck makes learning terribly difficult — as teachers and students well know.

If only someone would come up with a theory to explain this bottleneck. If only that theory would help teachers and students succeed despite its narrow confines.

Good News, with a Twist

Happily, that theory exists. It’s called “cognitive load theory,” and several scholars in Australia (led by John Sweller) have been developing it for a few decades now.

It explains the relationship between infinite long-term memory and limited working memory. It explores practical classroom strategies to solve the problems created by this relationship.

Heck, it even muses upon evolutionary explanations for some quirky exceptions to its rules.

In other words, it has almost everything a teacher could want.

Alas — [warning: controversial opinion] — it does include one glaring difficulty.

Cognitive load theory helps educational psychologists talk with other educational psychologists about these topics.

However, it relies on on a long list of terms, each of which describes complex — sometimes counter-intuitive — concepts.

If you start reading articles based on cognitive load theory, you might well discover that …

… a particular teaching practice works this way because of the “split attention effect” (which doesn’t mean exactly what it sounds like),

… but it works that way because of the “expertise reversal effect,”

… and “element interactivity” might explain these contradictory results.

For this reason, paradoxically, teachers who try to understand and apply cognitive load theory often experience cognitive overload.

As a result, teachers would really benefit from a book that explains cognitive load theory so clearly as not to overwhelm our working memory.

Could such a book exist?

Ollie Lovell To The Rescue

Yes, reader, it exists. Oliver Lovell has written Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory In Action (as part of Tom Sherrington’s “In Action” series).

Lovell’s book does exactly what teachers want it to do: explain cognitive load theory without overloading our cognitive faculties.

Lovell accomplishes this feat with three strategies.

First, he has an impressive ability to explain cognitive load theory concepts with bracing clarity.

For instance, let’s go back to that “expertise reversal effect.” Why might a teaching strategy benefit a novice but not an expert?

Lovell’s answer: redundancy. Redundant information taxes working memory. And, crucially:

“What is redundant for an expert is not redundant for the novice, and instructional recommendations are reversed accordingly.”

That’s the “expertise reversal effect.” Pithy, clear, sensible.

Because he writes and explains so clearly, Lovell helps teachers understand all that cognitive load theory terminology without feeling overwhelmed.

Second, Lovell gives examples.

SO MANY CLASSROOM EXAMPLES.

Whatever grade you teach, whatever topic you teach, you’ll find your discipline, your grade, and your interests represented. (I believe Lovell is a math teacher; as a high-school English teacher, I never felt slighted or ignored.)

Geography, piano, computer programming. It’s all there.

Knowing that clear explanations of worked examples can reduce working memory load, he provides plenty.

Practicing What He Preaches

Third, Lovell simplifies needless complexities.

Students of cognitive load theory will notice that he more-or-less skips over “germane” cognitive load: a category that has (ironically) created all sorts of “extraneous” working memory load for people trying to understand the theory.

He describes the difference between biologically primary and biologically secondary learning. And he explains the potential benefits this theory offers school folk.

However, Lovell doesn’t get bogged down in this niche-y (but fascinating) topic. He gives it just enough room, but not more.

Heck, he even keeps footnotes to a minimum, so as not to split the reader’s attention. Now that’s dedication to reducing working memory load!

Simply put: Lovell both explains and enacts strategies to manage working memory load just right.

In Brief

No doubt your pile of “must read” books is intimidatingly large.

If you want to know how to manage working memory load (and why doing so matters), Lovell’s Cognitive Load Theory in Action should be on top of that pile.

A final note:

I suspect Lovell’s explanations are so clear because he has lots of experience explaining.

Check out his wise, thoughtful, well-informed podcasts here.

Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology by Michelle Miller

Erik Jahner, PhD

July-19-2022

Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology by Michelle Miller

The cognition of remembering and forgetting is central to our lives and our intellectual valuation of ourselves. Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World refreshes our knowledge and shares best practices, but it also situates and reframes the way we approach thinking about memory. The author, Michelle D. Miller, is a professor of psychological science and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. Her experience teaching, consulting, and listening to educators make this book an authentic dialog with the reader. She displays a nuanced understanding of how the concepts of memory have not only cognitive and instructional relevance but also are embedded in deeply held cultural beliefs, persistent half-truths, and pedagogical value systems. Media coverage and coffee-shop conversations about the promises and pitfalls of technology and memory have been rife with incomplete knowledge, myths, and overzealous myth-busting. In this very accessible but thorough book, Miller helps us navigate this and get our footing.

Miller respects the idea that teaching instructors is a social-emotional endeavor, not an act of transmitting a set of best practices. Before beginning to evaluate the science, it is important to understand our preconceived notions and how our value systems bias our perspective. What is hype and what is fearmongering? Where has the science been misrepresented to preserve traditions or sell the next big idea? In all her chapters, as well as the structure of the book overall, Miller helps us to situate ourselves within the larger cultural value systems surrounding this area of cognition. She helps us understand the foundations of arguments and only then does she guide us through the science that supports or refutes some of these beliefs. We cannot seek to improve our practices without first respecting and understanding our current dispositions.

As Miller points out, many of us remember foundational models of memory from introduction to psychology courses or some highlights from a text read long ago. The science examining the mechanisms of memory has come a long way and the basic models have been updated but not yet socialized. These early models led many of us to design instructional material, but it’s time for an update. The science has become more ecologically valid and nuanced, and Miller pulls these updates into the text, not through a dense academic literature review, but by illustrating research findings through our everyday experiences: she shows us that the updates make sense. Moreover, the summaries of the studies presented are accurate and well-cited translations of cognitive-neuroscience for those seeking a deeper dive.

The book’s topics are clearly organized, easily referenced, and situated in a narrative structure enjoyable for a long plane ride or summer beach read. She starts the book with a review of the place technology has in our culture and how we generally feel about it, separating the arguments over morality and hype from the arguments over the impact. In the second chapter, she dives into the science, painting a picture of updated models and evidence. This includes some fun but measured myth-busting. We then get into some very concrete best practices: How can we improve our memory? How can we enhance instruction? And where is memory improvement necessary, and where is it important to rely on technology as a cognitive extension of ourselves? As she moves into the topic of attention, we are reminded that technology has often been demonized, but technology is a double-edged sword; it both supports and distracts. We see in the final chapters a balanced view helping to sort out the wheat from the chafe and set up a framework for evaluating the ongoing rapid development of cultural innovations. Technology will continue to evolve, and we need to develop a healthy, critical, curious, and exploratory disposition towards its integration.

While one gets many very concrete suggestions from this book, it is the framing that really lands this book. It trains the reader to think flexibly about the present and the future. I can’t wait to read it again and share Miller’s insights with my students and colleagues.

The Power of Us by Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel

Erik Jahner, PhD

June-21-2022

The Power of Us by Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel

The broad use of social media, internet search engines, personalized news feeds, and other emerging information technologies have influenced the ways we have been constructing our identities. This has only accelerated during the ongoing pandemic as many of our social connections are accessed only through likes, links, and subscriptions. Taking a moment to reflect, we all notice how our identities are channeled into group memberships and conceptual echo chambers which have served to increase socio-political polarization and reduce the number of people we interact with who might challenge our views. The Power of Us: Harnessing Our Shared Identities to Improve Performance, Increase Cooperation, and Promote Social Harmony by Dominic Packer and Jay Van Bavel is an important update on identity research with direct relevance to the current landscape. The title suggests a monumental task, and the authors meet their proposal head-on, methodically taking the reader on an exploration of multiple identities and group affiliations while offering direction toward progress on many seemingly intractable problems.

Watching the news can often lead to a sense of loss, hopelessness, and confusion, but this text acts as a conceptual scaffolding allowing us to perceive the world in a way that reduces the sense of overwhelm. Keeping up with current events and managing our emotional responses leaves little time to identify and integrate new research into our perspectives and make sense of this changing world. Packer and Van Bavel do an exemplary job of translating and integrating social, psychological, cognitive, neuroscientific, and even genetic research and heightening your curiosity. Many of us are familiar with the early work on bias, racism, and in- and out-group relations, but when was the last time you checked your understanding and updated those ideas? They unpack many of our socialized myths and misconceptions about previous research while offering new interpretations and tantalizing new avenues of thought. Integrating research in the lighter areas of food flavors, school spirit, and competitive sports outcomes with the weightier topics of race relations, violence, political divides, international politics, and fake news, the reader experiences the rigor without the exhaustion.

The rhetorical style feels like a coffee shop conversation with engaging intellectual appetizers keeping the text light and easy to digest, but still rich enough to drive a deeper intellectual challenge. This is no lecture from an ivory tower but instead an engaging debate. Unlike much of what we see every day, you will leave this text feeling integrated into the society around you, not a passive participant or confused onlooker. The multiple selves within you and those around you are connected and we can ignore or renew these connections; this initiates this process by making the unconscious conscious and adding to the conceptual foundation for personal and societal development.

Given that scientific thought is under constant attack, the book also addresses many of the challenges brought against science itself. But it does not attack the critics; instead, it offers up an important internal critique of the scientific process through a discussion of metascience and the search to discover if science is indeed uncovering truths or has created its own echo chambers. Overall, they find the scientific process successful but offer advice. For the researchers, it asks the important question of whether their labs have evolved to support their views or if researchers have actively sought intellectual debate and disagreement. While the authors rightly elevate scientific thinking as part of the solution, they increase awareness that science, like all other human endeavors, is not immune to bias. This same approach is important for educators, policymakers, and administrators to consider: how is the system you are part of addressing identity formation and what needs to change?

A common approach to social divide and fake news is to offer more information, but as the authors point out, more information does not remove the bias, and sometimes more information adds more interpretations. We need to build individual practices, systems, and opportunities to challenge and enrich our knowledge. After reading this book, you will be left with a sense of hope. While the book is critical and planned in its approach to the literature, it also is optimistic lighting potential paths out of the darkness and confusion.

Erik Jahner, PhD

May-17-2022

Failure to Disrupt by Justin Reich

Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education is a well-written critical synthesis of overzealous claims and unrealistic attempts to revolutionize education through technology. Its author, Justin Reich, is an Assistant Professor in the Comparative Media Studies department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he studies future learning. He is also the creator of several publications and EdX courses on education as well as the designer of online courses for teacher education (which he offers a critique of in the current work). His writing here, while critical of the field’s progress, is also inspiring with down-to-earth realism that gives the reader access to a balanced evaluation of technology’s impact on education.

The previous decades have been loaded with unfulfilled promises offered by technology. Fears that teachers would be replaced by computers were ultimately unrealized but too was the dream of a radical improvement and the democratization of a suffering education system. Bombarded by every innovation and the pandemic, the teacher and administrator could be forgiven for not seeing through the weeds of their own learning management systems. The claims have been loud, but the practice has become habitual and administrative without time or cognitive space for critical evaluation (although we have all had the best of intentions). Training new teachers on technology and standardizing systems have become the practices of everyday teaching. There is a lot out there, but no clear way to sort through it. This book is a nice place to catch up and get back in the game.

There is no doubt that this book is critical of aspects of the education-via-technology revolution, but Reich is not ranting against the use of technology. He instead grounds evaluation in research, breaking his insights into several themes. Schools, teachers, and society will often use new technologies not to innovate and transform ways of educating but instead they become new playgrounds for old practices. Current systems exhibit a strong gravity to maintain practices, and new technologies can become just another way to duplicate previous methods pulling along for the ride both what works and what doesn’t. Regarding computer-assisted instruction and assessment, we have found that these still are most effective at routine learning and highly formalized technical knowledge. They do not yet effectively tackle the development of communicative competence, critical thinking, abstract thinking, and reasoning. Furthermore, the promise of equity has not been borne out so far by the technology. It seems to be that those with greater access use the technology more frequently and more efficaciously than those who have been traditionally neglected by the system; as Reich argues, educational technology may widen already existing gaps. And finally, the promise of big data insights that have been so useful in other sciences has been severely limited by privacy laws and restrictions on student experimentation. The author dissuades us of the notion offered by the sales reps that the technology will be the magic pill of education. However, while these claims appear pessimistic, there is much more to this text than deconstructing the ed-tech industry.

Through engaging the book, the reader develops a better understanding of the larger ecology of instructional technologies. Reich arms the reader with systems of thinking and methods of evaluation that empower readers to be informed consumers of existing and emerging computer-aided instruction. Through this evaluation, Reich also makes the reader aware of their own practices in existing frameworks. I found myself rethinking what I was using technology for in the courses I teach but also learned about many other systems that were out there. What others are doing well, and how I could capitalize on their learnings to broaden my own impact. The reader can use this book similarly to tinker around the edges and discover what might work well for their content-specific learning goals while being aware of the potential caveats, persistent pitfalls, and opportunities while integrating technology in instruction.

One of Reich’s main points is that learning technologies are not wholly new. They are new forms of previous technologies and ways of thinking. We can also learn about current technologies by looking back at their historic forms and the theory that the new forms are built upon. This is also probably true of the field of education, often new theorists and practitioners repackage previous ideas and their successes or failures are somewhat predictable based on previous iterations. Reich’s assessment of emerging systems helps unify this history and our ongoing missions in education.

The Art of Insubordination by Todd Kashdan

Erik Jahner, PhD

April-20-2022

The Art of Insubordination by Todd Kashdan

The Art of Insubordination: How to Dissent and Defy Effectively, a provocative title in a time of incredible social turmoil. One may think Todd B. Kashdan focuses on defying a system that is oppressive and conformist; the title brings to mind today’s dominant political polarization and the culture wars but also the professional and academic communities that decry individual dissent. In some ways, this is exactly what this book addresses, but in a more profound way, it is a book about taking the chances necessary to discover yourself and build a deeper understanding of your relationship with the society around you. It is a book about growth – about psychological creativity, bravery, and flexibility.

This ‘cookbook’, as the author describes it, is about cultivating the strength to explore, openness to ideas that you can stand behind, the power to stand up for your beliefs, and the wisdom of humility. The reader is asked to consider their personal internalized social expectations in a critical light – challenge both forms of cognitive bias but also challenge the passive acceptance of social values. This psychological nudge is delivered through historical examples that tickle the curiosity funny bone but are also incredibly relevant in light of current events. They range from topics such as the male basketball players’ resistance to throwing underhanded to our historical complicity in violations of civil rights. What does it take to remain complicit when we feel internal distress and what does it take to nurture the bravery necessary to practice small and large acts of rebellion? It’s easy to see these examples generalized to current efforts of organized labor and the frustrating attempts to return to a pre-COVID world in the classroom that had its own problems we never addressed. Even if you do not see yourself as a rebel, your daily life is filled with opportunities for small acts of insubordination that could improve your lived experience and our shared experience.

Throughout this guided self-exploration, we are also presented with a critical synthesis of scientific evidence from social-emotional research. This includes the surfacing the recent research investigating ‘grit’ as a psychological construct through a clever critique without dismissing it. He practices what he suggests in this book by demonstrating critique and humility, and he asks that you do the same. Even when I found myself wanting to disagree, I felt cleverly disarmed and open to very valuable lessons.

Communities of research and practice often lead us to question whether we belong. His practices will help you not only fight effectively to be heard but also facilitate your development as a better team player at work. It’s not always about finding a new bubble sometimes it’s about exerting personal agency in a skilled way helping others recognize your value but also humbly recognizing theirs. There are more options offered here than subordination, changing careers, or feeling the pressure to fight for your life.

The book also lends itself well to educators and parents. It has an entire section devoted to the deliberate scaffolding of ‘insubordinate’ children, and this easily is generalized to teaching. One of the core goals of education is to foster critical thinking, but too often our goal of critical thinking simply is interpreted as a need to ‘be critical’. The author drives home the point that being a critical thinker involves being humble, empathetic, creative, and open-minded. As much of our current discussions are in echo chambers, the book helps readers as parents and participants in society engage in new diverse social arenas where we can negotiate new realities. Kashdan does not just tell you how important this is, he also builds a road map and offers practical exercises to help you navigate the social and emotional difficulties that will arise when you meet dissenters.

Principled rebellion is not about fighting others, is about the deliberate effort to challenge a system. It is not about combating and tolerating others, it’s about welcoming and fostering ways of thinking. Kashdan encourages us to cultivate our creativity, bring together disparate ideas, and open our minds to challenge systems.

Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12 by Peter Liljedahl

Erik Jahner, PhD

March-21-2022

Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12 by Peter Liljedahl

Initially, I looked at this title and thought “not another best practice book” the bookstores already have too many poor books on how to teach content effectively. However, I begrudgingly opened Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12: 14 Teaching Practices for Enhancing Learning and found an unexpected reward. As a learning scientist, I was pleasantly surprised by Peter Liljedahl’s approach to education. There is no ivory tower mentality here: no belief that teachers need to align with abstract theory or laboratory learnings not grounded in practice. Liljedahl really sees teachers! The contents of this book come from countless observations and trials in real classrooms and the best practices that emerged from them. He begins with a basic premise in his observations asking what the factors that encourage “thinking” in the mathematics classroom are; and then, based on extensive research, he unwraps 14 concrete and often deceptively simple recommendations that have emerged.

Yes, a best practices book can be a page-turner. I am not a math teacher, and I would say I did not have a pleasant experience with math in my youth. However, what I was reading here really resonated with me, and the recommendations for enhancing learning are not isolated to mathematics. The reader’s attention is drawn to practices that, at times, seem minor but can have big impacts on learning. Consistent with the author’s notion of encouraging thinking, the material is presented in such a way that it provokes curiosity. Amazingly simple questions spark interest: where should students practice math: whiteboards on the wall, whiteboards on the table, posterboards, or notebooks? He takes us through the investigation predicting our thinking and ending each section with frequently asked questions that reveal he has had plenty of field experience with teachers and skeptics.

Each chapter engages the teacher’s likely goals and a comparison to student goals. Throughout the book, I found myself in the narrative of each giving me insight into my learning and my teaching. Take group work that is central to every active classroom: when we are instructors, we plan groupings carefully; but when we are students, we often have another interpretation of instructor efforts in mind, and we have our own social goals. Liljedahl brings these into some alignment, so both student and teacher work toward deeper thinking. As the author points out, students and teachers love to think and think deeply when the conditions facilitate and don’t interfere or distract.

While each chapter ends with a summary of the main points in the form of macro and micro moves that we can take as educators, the meat of the chapters offers valuable context and back up the claims in ways that allow us to spread the knowledge captured in these pages among our peers. I tried to critique every suggestion, but the author was particularly good at anticipating this doubt, and those points not addressed in the main narrative were given direct attention in the frequently asked questions sections at the end of each chapter, a part that I particularly enjoyed.

But best practices mean little in standardized systems that constrain our ability to create — “There is no more time. There is no room to add more. ” Stop fretting, evidence is loaded into these pages that refute that the teacher is too constrained to enhance learning in these ways. The author breaks down curricular time into minute-by-minute activities demonstrating that these practices enable efficient use of classroom time. Other concerns about making sure you meet curricular demands are also addressed. Not all activities are curricular and that’s ok; instead, they often prepare the learner to do curricular activities effectively. Constrained by finance? Alternatives abound and are supported by previous implementation and testing. If you have reasons to not enhance student learning as suggested, be prepared to have those concerns alleviated.

So the book is useful for teachers, but what about the researcher who yearns for an academic discussion. If this is you, you also have something great to learn on these pages. This book is an illustrative guide of one excellent way to do great learning science research. The researcher will learn from Liljedahl’s communication and experience with teachers. But will also be tickled by the attention to detail and nuance that is enjoyable in all scientific endeavors. Science is about seeing and noticing and letting the data teach us. This is what you will find here making it an excellent lighthearted college text for preparing teachers or researchers.

Often an education book offers much for the reader as both a teacher and a learner. This book is no exception. Take some of these practices to your own learning opportunities, places of work, research labs, and faculty meetings. Enjoy thinking deeply with Liljedahl.

Liljedahl, P. (2020). Building thinking classrooms in mathematics, grades K-12: 14 teaching practices for enhancing learning. Corwin Press

Erik Jahner, PhD

February-22-2022

Rationality by Steven Pinker

Over the last couple of years, we have often felt like the world is losing its collective mind. The news is profuse with interviews and shocking examples of apparent declines in rational thinking, and we are faced with regular internet propaganda that seems to assume we are not able to sort out the reasoned from the crazy. We are left to wonder “Why do people believe such crazy things? What is the human race coming to?” and we may begin to question our own sanity. But there are plenty of books and studies out there that marvel at our irrational thinking already. Instead, Steven Pinker takes a less cynical view of human nature in Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters. While he understands the appeal of studying cognitive bias and distorted perception, he laments the exoticization and excessive attention on our seemingly irrational behaviors and celebrates the evolutionary achievement of a rationality toolbox that has been tested by time and continues to be robust.

This book was developed from a course Pinker taught at Harvard at the request of his students who were similarly having trouble making sense of this current reality and wanted tools to aid in social transformation. The reading is dense, but reads like a masterclass or engaging college course, mixing content with humor and politics, through Pinker’s usual excellent teaching and way with words.

Pinker introduces rationality through a unique intersection of evolution, psychology, and cultural anthropology. He begins by asking an important question: where and why does rationality emerge? In particular, he points out that logic, statistics, and scientific reason are not the sole products of some western or eastern modern enlightenment but are instead a natural progression found cross-culturally as a human adaptation to complement our biased cognition. Rationality is “a kit of cognitive tools that can attain particular goals in particular worlds” so it, therefore, emerges wherever humans flourish.

Rationality is not only available to the ivory-tower academics that pour over texts; it is available to everyone and can be found in unexpected places as a natural development. One example that Pinker returns to here from his previous work is the San people of the Kalahari desert, a modern hunter-gatherer society who have developed a well-tuned scientific set of reasoning skills that have allowed them to adapt to their environment. Far from intellectually primitive, the San people employ critical thinking and hypothesis testing in their daily lives. They use skills we attempt to teach our children. The San have developed advanced skills of probability theory and logic that allow them to use the information in their environments to their advantage: Bayesian reasoning is utilized to determine which tracks to follow when hunting; their survival depends on knowing the difference between correlation and causation. In addition, there is a kind of peer review process wherein an argument to methods of hunting or gathering can be brought by any individual into group discussions from which the group can evaluate new ideas and accept or reject those ideas based on their merits.

But this book is not about the San it is about finding rationality in our daily lives and applying it. The core of the book examines many of the classic studies by Thomas Schelling, Daniel Kahneman, and Amos Tversky who studied cognitive bias; but Pinker now recontextualizes them showing that regardless of our apparently irrational behavior, humans have evolved rationality and logic to guide our living in the world.

As you move through the book, you will encounter arguments about our better nature, about the opportunities rational thinking brings, and even some critique of politics and social institutions. The reader can enjoy engaging in a critical discussion concerning the shortcoming and opportunities of both the political right and left, but Pinker also takes political stances that may be unpopular and not always what one would expect. Whether you agree or not, this honest intellectual engagement is refreshing, gets the blood pumping, and prepares one for lively dinner table discussions.

One of the main goals in education is to scaffold the development of the rational thinking process. While the book is not on education per se, it brings to consciousness the thinking processes we want to see in our students, ourselves, and our social institutions. It also has some fun thought experiments that can be adapted to the classroom. But, moreover, this book takes us back to the rational and grounds us in reasoning skills that we too often take for granted. It gives us something to hold onto and appreciate even when the world seems out of its mind.

Erik Jahner, PhD

January-19-2022

The Goldilocks Map by Andrew Watson

The Goldilocks Map: A Classroom Teacher’s Quest to Evaluate ‘Brain-Based’ Teaching Advice is an entertaining and eye-opening conversation that seeks to help the reader develop a way of thinking that is sorely missing in today’s discourse around teaching and the brain. It is often stated that we need to be critical consumers of brain-based research as we apply it to the classroom; this book gives a roadmap showing us how. Andrew Watson takes us on this “quest” that reflects his 16 years of teaching experience and subsequent “Mind, Brain, Education” degree. The coaching in this book is an essential introduction for the developing teacher, the experienced teacher seeking to develop their understanding, as well as the experienced researcher who could always use a course in effective translation and writing. The experience Watson offers is delightful for all.

Andrew Watson embeds this search for understanding of the Neuroscience and Psychology of education through a playful and humorous narrative. For some readers, embedding neuroscience in the quests of Aladdin, Goldilocks, and Middle Earth may be off-putting. But seriously, you need to relax a bit and enjoy. In fact, accepting this narrative style is an essential element in disarming our pretentious mindsets and allows one to approach this field with an authentic search for understanding and intellectual transparency while still embracing the simple joys of good storytelling.

The book is not an encyclopedic rehashing of implications of neuroscience for education, but it fills an important gap. Through a series of deep dives into themes such as environmental enrichment, spaced learning, and music in education, the reader is coached on how to locate, evaluate, and communicate research around these topics and more. As someone who regularly translates between neuroscience and education, I found the book refreshing and very useful.

One of the books greatest strengths is its attention to language use in research and translation. Watson highlights the word use and phrasing used by advocates for neuroeducation and calls our attention to some of the ridiculousness in original publications as well as our subsequent attempts to explain this research to colleagues. However, he does not diminish the research but elevates it by revealing the intention behind published words making the research more accessible. Without careful intention, we may catch ourselves and our peers exercising some common missteps by using language to obfuscate our lack of understanding or to add gravitas to otherwise empty phrases. I guarantee that you will humbly find your own words reflected in these pages and gain strategies to communicate more effectively.

Watson also is taking us on an active quest of discovery by not seeking our passive acceptance of research and application. Each chapter empowers the reader, as a member of the mind, brain, education community, to engage the community with a sense of exploration. Teachers are not simply consumers of research; the translation they enact brings to bear their expertise in acts of community involvement that make this research living. In my opinion, researchers are too often placed on pedestals and some researchers hide in their ivory towers of academia. Here we have the tools to pull this community together and flatten the illusion of a hierarchy.

There are also plenty of unanticipated “gems” in this book that will inspire you to take a moment to go on your own exploratory journey to accompany the pages. I found myself on many occasions pulling up a suggested web resource and learning something new or exploring an article I previously read out of pure curiosity inspired by these pages. I frequently jotted down particularly important turns of phrase and thought experiments that I could put to immediate use in my own scientific practice to not only make my work easier to understand for others but also to help make my own goals transparent to me.

This intellectual, entertaining, and often humorous engagement with the field is just what we all needed – useful as an introduction and useful to get us back on track.

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