Book Reviews – Page 5 – Education & Teacher Conferences

Andrew Watson

January 23, 2023

The Hidden Lives of Learners

Many times over the last several years, I’ve heard enthusiastic reviews of a seemingly-magical book called The Hidden Lives of Learners, by Graham Nuthall.

Here’s the magic: Nuthall’s frankly astonishing research method.

Working in New Zealand classrooms in the 1980s, he put mics on all students and teachers. And, he had cameras in the classroom.

He and his team also broke down the teachers’ unit plans into granular learning goals. For instance, a unit on Antarctica might have 80 specific facts or concepts that the students should learn.

Finally, Nuthall’s team tested students both before and after these units.

Given this quite extraordinary data set, Team Nuthall could look at remarkably specific questions:

How much information about each topic did students already know before the unit began?

How much did they learn?

What, very specifically, did each student do and say to learn each specific new concept?

You can see why readers have responded so strongly to Nuthall’s method.

So, based on all his data, what did Nuthall conclude?

The Magic Number

Regular blog readers already know about the Spacing Effect.

That is: students learn more when they spread practice out than when they do the same amount of practice all at once.

In my experience, this research finding started getting broader notice in … say … 2015 or so. (I completed my grad program in 2012, and I don’t remember the spacing effect getting much — or any — attention at that time.)

Well, Nuthall’s research led him to a very similar conclusion more than a decade before.

That is: in Hidden Lives, Nuthall writes…

We discovered that a student needed to encounter, on at least three different occasions, the complete set of the information she or he neede to understand a concept.

If the information was incomplete, or not experienced on three different occasions, the student did not learn the concept. (63)

Similar to research into the spacing effect, Nuthall’s research shows that students must devote brain space to an idea several times — spread out over more than one class meeting — to consolidate that idea in long-term memory.

Later in Hidden Lives (p. 126), Nuthall suggests that students should “encounter the complete set of information” on four occassions — not three.

For me, the precise number (is it 4? is it 3?) is less important than the broader concept: teachers should build curricula that ensure students delve into an idea several times. One or two encounters can’t create enough momentum to change memory systems.

I think that Nuthall’s method provides substantial support for translating the spacing effect research into classroom practice. Both psychology research AND Nuthall’s deep classroom investigation arrive independently at substantially similar ideas.

Changing the Focus

Most research in this field focuses on what teachers do. Nuthall — wisely — insists that we focus on what students do.

His methodology — all those microphones, all those transcripts — helps him recognize all those “encounters” with ideas. And, crucially, students often “encounter” ideas in their conversations and projects with other students.

This observation leads to several important insights.

First, students often have prior knowledge about a topic.

When that prior knowledge is incorrect, it BOTH hinders their understanding of new ideas AND hampers their classmates’ efforts to learn correct ideas.

For this reason — I’m extrapolating from Nuthall here — teachers really should focus on students’ prior misconceptions.

Unless we know what our students (wrongly) think they know, their misinformation will substantially muddle the learning process.

Second, building classroom culture matters.

This seemingly obvious statement comes from one of Nuthall’s most alarming findings (well: alarming to me).

The students in these classes were AMAZINGLY unkind to one another. Casual insults — even racial epithets — made up a regular part of classroom dialogue.

Nuthall proposes two solutions to this problem.

Option A: “Teachers therefore need to know who is in which friendship groups, who wants to be liked by whom, who has status, who is rejected.

They also need to know the kinds of beliefs and culture — about music, clothes, curriculum, learning, co-operating, and the like — that hold students’ relationships together.” (p. 37)

While I understand the logic behind this statement, it strikes me as frankly impossible. As I think over my various sophomore and senior English classes, it’s simply inconceivable to me that I would know — with any level of consistent detail — what the exact relationships are among all these people.

I might have a dim idea that this student is especially popular, or that those two are dating, or that some song or another has everyone’s attention. But for that knowledge to be broad and current: no way.

In fact, I think it would be inappropriate for me to know such things. Inquiring too closely into students’ personal and romantic lives does not strike me as healthy or appropriate.

A Better Way?

Happily, Nuthall proposes Option B:

“Some teachers have tried to deal with this problem [peer-to-peer unkindness] by creating an alternative culture within their classrooms — a culture of mutual respect and cooperation, a culture in which everyone is expected to succeed in some significant aspect of classroom activities.” (p. 37)

Now, this approach seems healthy, appropriate, and necessary.

Yes, I want my students to learn about Macbeth and topic sentences, but I also insist that they know how to treat one another well.

Nuthall’s findings about casual peer cruelty has reminded me how much happens in my classroom that I can’t see (“hidden lives of learners”), and how important it is that I solve those invisible problems.

The Very Big Picture

One final point stood out for me in Nuthall’s book, although my interpretation of it might not persuade you. Here’s the story…

Because Nuthall measured how much students already knew, and what they did to learn new information, he could track important patterns. One pattern went like this:

Students who didn’t know much about the topic learned most from the teacher.

Students who already knew a lot learned most by working on their own, or with peers. (pp. 86-7)

I think this finding might help us see past a controvesial binary in the field of education.

Current schooling debates have encouraged us to pick sides. Either we believe in direct instruction, or we believe in project pedagogies. (This sentence oversimplifies a very complex debate, but is a useful shorthand at this moment.)

Nuthall’s findings (and my own reading of schema theory) suggest an alternative viewpoint. Perhaps

Students who don’t know much about a topic (a.k.a. “novices”) learn most from the teacher (a.k.a. “direct instruction”), whereas

Students who already know a lot (a.k.a. “relative experts”) learn most by working on their own, or with peers (a.k.a. “project pedagogies”).

That is: before we say whether direct instruction or independent investigation is better for a student, we have to know where the student lies on the novice/expert continuum.

Novices need lots of guidance; relative experts benefit from more open-ended, self-driven exploration.

To be clear: I’ve been quietly advocating for this view for a few years now. It seems to me — although I could be wrong — that Nuthall’s data roughly support it.

Read This Book If…

…You’re intrigued by the possibility of extremely granular classroom research, focusing directly on the students’ experience,

…you want to see how the spacing effect plays out in the classroom,

…perhaps you want to know more about how students actually treat each other in day-to-day interactions.

…you want to hear an inventive and thoughtful researcher think aloud about his findings.

I don’t agree with everything that Nuthall has written. For instance, his account of working memory is not at all in line with current models of this cognitive function.

But, gosh: he and his book have given me lots to think about, and new ways to think about old ideas.

Erik Jahner, PhD

December 19, 2022

Thrivers by Michele Borba

Michele Borba begins this book by making a very important distinction: we have sought to raise children who strive, but while strivers can reach for more, they are left feeling empty and with dwindling psychological reserves when their goals are not met. A necessary ingredient is a deep inner strength and grounded identity where one explores who they are rather than simply trying to prove their worth with extrinsic grades and accomplishments. We need a generation of thrivers with strong cores and character strengths that will enable them to move forward with purpose as they build their identities and maximize their potential. In her book, Thrivers: The Surprising Reasons Why Some Kids Struggle and Others Shine, she prepares us to teach our children and create the best environment for kids to develop the seven core character strengths that lead to flourishing: increasing their self-confidence, empathy, integrity, self-control, curiosity, perseverance, and optimism. But we do this, not by imposing our beliefs, but by listening to our children and helping them discover who they are becoming.

One appreciates the important distinctions Borba makes as she compares not only strivers and thrivers but also draws important distinctions between self-esteem and confidence. This important attention to the words we use is one of the author’s fundamental strengths. The book teaches the reader not only what to do but clarifies a vocabulary that frames the discussion. But these distinctions are not platitudes, she backs them up with research even to the point of discussing research that shows the benefit of asking children for “helpers” as opposed to asking for “help.” When do we ask ‘why?’ When do we ask ‘who?’ Throughout the text, we are shown the benefit of these subtle changes that we can make that can mean a lot for identity development.

The research-driven focus of this book is grounded in the voices of young people and how they are making sense of the culture they are growing up in. We hear how children are interpreting the intentions of adults and how they view their personal strengths and aspirations. You will quickly find that these authentic voices echo the youth in your life, but here Borba helps us to situate these ideas into themes that allow us to deeply attend to what our kids are saying leading us to ways we can better support them. Importantly these pages also alert the reader to the questions we are not asking our kids. This rich dialogic structure makes the book a fun read as you see the frank, often funny, and always insightful ways kids explain their world. It is these voices that bolster the concrete recommendations that permeate the pages.

From the first chapter, you can navigate the book as you see fit guided by the early surveys to assess character strengths. The surveys and activities make for an interactive and reflective read while stirring your creativity as you develop the long-term project of trying to support a child’s development. While some of these activities are simple boards or charts to help children build these essential skills, much of the book is dedicated to helping you change your conversations. Borba takes simple regular activities and life events and suggests how we can converse with kids to grow their character strengths and explore identity and motivation.

While this book gives recommendations geared toward toddlers to young adults, I would also argue that it is loaded to the brim with concrete advice for self-improvement for the adult reader. Yes, of course, it can help one be a better mentor, but it also helps the reader to turn the activities on themselves. Who among us does not believe our self-confidence, empathy, integrity, self-control, curiosity, perseverance, and optimism can use some tweaking as we search for our own actualized selves? Many of the life hacks you will find in this book will apply to you as well. What is your own inner language you use to coach yourself? What are some of the character strengths you would like to improve? And how can you do some simple activities to explore yourself and help ground your own identity? If you are reading this book to be a better mentor, teacher, or parent, this book can take you along in their journey not as a guide, but also as a partner.

ADHD and Asperger Syndrome in Smart Kids and Adults by Thomas Brown

Erik Jahner, PhD

November 22, 2022

ADHD and Asperger Syndrome in Smart Kids and Adults by Thomas Brown

In ADHD and Asperger Syndrome in Smart Kids and Adults: Twelve Stories of Struggle, Support, and Treatment, Thomas Brown shares engaging and informative stories of gifted individuals with ADHD. This series of case studies takes on the traditional definitions and misconceptions of both ADHD and Asperger’s syndrome, focusing instead on how clusters of symptoms including social-emotional skills and an in-depth understanding of the individual’s social environment reveal a fascinating and useful approach to diagnosis and treatment.

Brown does not shy away from critiques of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and illustrates his perspective by walking us through several diagnoses and treatments for individuals with these symptoms from across age groups. Particular attention is given to one of the interesting puzzles of ADHD in which the symptoms are situational and not consistently expressed. When an individual is engaged in an activity they are interested in, the symptoms of ADHD seem to subside, and strong executive function may be expressed in that context. As a result, parents, teachers, and individuals with ADHD may inappropriately interpret the attentional and emotion regulation problems as simply a lack of willpower. Throughout each of the cases, Brown demonstrates how the symptoms of ADHD often lead to these types of misunderstandings and how diagnoses can lead to a sense of relief and enable the utilization of medical and psychotherapeutic interventions to manage the symptoms.

What makes Brown’s case studies so important is that he takes an integrated view of ADHD. He argues that an emotional component of the diagnosis is crucial and often neglected. Individuals differ in their emotional regulation problems and these case studies illustrate these regulatory symptoms and their situational nature. Bringing emotional and cognitive features into the same diagnosis criteria connects well with the literature on the fallacy that cognitive skills and emotional skills are separate psychological functions; both rely on the same neural circuitry leading to motivation, regulation, and potential disruption. Pooling together the traditional reliance on regulating focus as a primary symptom with the regulation of working memory, regulation of emotional reactions and frustration, the initiation of effort, self-monitoring, the regulation of actions, and the ability to activate engagement in work rounds out the diagnosis to include the whole person. This is especially useful when teachers or parents view ADHD as a more academic skill and are made aware of how ADHD is a lived experience across life domains.

Important for this text is also a deep impassioned discussion concerning the now absent diagnoses of Asperger’s syndrome which has now been absorbed into the updated diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. To be honest, this was an area I began to read with a certain amount of trepidation, but the author offers very convincing arguments for the reintroduction of Asperger’s syndrome into the DSM giving me great pause in my preconceived beliefs. The unique clusters of symptoms and ways to manage symptoms separate this disorder in convincing ways from Autism. Moreover, the integration of ADHD and Asperger’s into this text shows the important and informative comorbidity of the symptoms.

The development of his case studies respects the social ecology of individuals in this group, relying not solely on standardized diagnostics but evaluating how impairments may be displayed differentially across a person’s life. Asking questions of the patients to reveal their unique symptomology rather than imposing a diagnosis. The individual’s perceived relationships with family, friends, coworkers and teachers are key to effective interventions. Building on this, the book also has an extensive final section offering resources for diagnosis and treatment.

While this book is great for the clinician, it would also be of great use to individuals who interact with this population regularly. It helps the reader understand their stories and teaches the reader how the skilled clinician listens to get more complete stories of the individual – not treating the individual as a collection of symptoms but understanding the complex role ADHD plays in their lives. In addition, this book is a useful window into a variety of diverse human experiences. In some ways, these stories are unique while simultaneously speaking to us all – building a sense of compassion for the miraculous ways the brain contributes to what it means to be human and part of a community.

Behind their Screens What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing) by Emily Weinstein and Carrie James

Erik Jahner, PhD

October 19, 2022

Behind their Screens What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing) by Emily Weinstein and Carrie James

So, you think you know what effect social media has on teens? There is one problem: too much screen time. Many of us have very strong opinions like this mostly developed through poor media coverage of the research, but you will develop much a more nuanced, well-reasoned and balanced argument through this book that will have you carefully reevaluating what you think you know. In Behind their Screens What Teens Are Facing (and Adults Are Missing), Emily Weinstein and Carrie James discuss data gleaned from thousands of teen interviews as they tried to understand the relationship between teens and digital devices and platforms. Both authors are Harvard researchers and parents bringing to their writing the insights from both research and understanding of what it means to be a parent for teens today. The book is a very nice succinct and clear summary of the research done to date on the issue.

Teen lives today are highly politicized and sensationalized, and often media insights are presented as absolute truth. This book asks you to look at the research a bit more deeply and to ask important critical questions. You are not expected to accept the authors’ conclusions at face value, instead, they walk you through multiple interpretations, making sure you first know the right questions to ask. While the entirety of the text gives detail about the methods and motivations of the authors’ research, the appendix further explains their methods enabling practitioners and researchers alike to learn from the careful consideration Weinstein and James gave their design. In many ways, their research design itself shows us how to communicate with teens. Much of which involves simply giving them the space to speak but also knowing what potential responses a carefully constructed question will afford.

Grounded in Urie Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of human development, the teen develops a nested set of societal, social and biological systems. To understand social media practices, we need to examine teen relationships with not only peers but also parents and adults who seek to find solutions for teen behavior and perhaps put too much blame on social media. We also need to respect their biological development, and how their neural circuitry sets them up to value rewards in different ways at different ages. The authors here are not simply trying to ask if social media impacts stress, anxiety, self-image, and depression in simple causal relationships; they put value in the context and the interaction of teen values and goals with digital practices. Skillfully, these authors managed to bring all of this complexity into a clear, informative, and entertaining read.

Individuality and variations in perspective are recurring themes in the text; teens are unique and complicated and there is no panacea that explains all relationships. They correctly point to individual variations in developmental trajectories for teens, the systematic variation in how teens interact with and internalize their relationships with the digital world. And, while always systematic, they remind us throughout that this is a complex system of relations that does not always have simple answers. Really, the best way to understand a teen is to listen.

The book covers a wide array of topics, and the authors do not shy away from the tough questions. Topics cover teen perspectives on politics, trading nudes, sexting, and teens’ understanding and concerns about their digital footprint. Through each of these topics, they ask not only what the impacts on teen wellness are but more importantly what are the reasons teens engage in these behaviors. What are the perceived benefits for teens and the social implications for engaging and not engaging?

Overall, the authors make a very clear case that we need to not simply tell teens how to use digital devices, offer them well-rehearsed sound bites, and beat them over the brow with restrictions, shaming, and warnings. While this may make us feel we have done our job this is not the more difficult work of trying to engage them in meaningful discussion where we all could learn something. We need to spend time with them, listen to them, and respect that they are engaging in digital behaviors for reasons: teens are not simply little adults; their motivations and experiences differ from ours. Our responsibility is to better understand those reasons and be there to help them write the stories that will empower them in their own development.

From Stressed to Resilient by Deborah Gilboa

Erik Jahner, PhD

September 20, 2022

From Stressed to Resilient by Deborah Gilboa

Our lives are filled with change and all change is stressful whether that change is good or bad. Whether stress takes a toll on our well-being or whether we use that stress to build resilience is determined partly by a set of skills that need to be practiced and refined. In From Stressed to Resilient: The Guide to Handle More and Feel it Less, Deborah Gilboa (Dr. G) has written an easy-to-follow workbook that enables the reader to build resilience.

The book is a dynamic, personalized instruction book for building and working on our resilience. It begins by putting forward a particular mindset toward stress: feelings of stress are our brains’ way of interpreting change; stress is an integral part of living and adapting. The goal of the book is not to reduce stress but to transform how we prepare for and react to feelings of stress, utilizing stress to make us strong. The early chapters help us understand the landscape of our own beliefs and reactions to stress and where some of the opportunities for social-emotional development are in our lives. The useful questionaries guide this process helping us determine what should be a priority when reading the book. But don’t take these questionaries as determinative of who you are. They take stock of you at the moment, so I found it useful to return to them regularly.

The remainder of the book is a series of exercises for which there is a useful set of accompanying PDFs and online resources. These subsequent eight sections target specific skills leading to resilience: building connections, setting boundaries, being open to change, managing discomfort, setting goals, finding options, taking action, and persevering. Each of these has multiple practices and avenues for development giving you ownership of your own growth.

For those of us that feel a sense of “just tell me what to do,” this book walks you through steps in an easy-to-follow way and the author’s humor and forthright analysis allow you to put all your energy into the necessary self-reflection the book invites. The process is deceptively simple but enables the reader to learn and grow in small measurable steps. This is not the type of book that you read cover to cover but you read it strategically, guided by the information in the early chapters but also by our changing life goals. I also often repeated the useful exercises as I saw fit and reread old responses to gain insight into my development. While some of the books I have reviewed here are research-heavy and academic theory-laden, this is truly a book for guided self-improvement.

I advise integrating the book somehow into your daily routine while you work through it. I found it useful to integrate the reflective exercises into my morning routine right after I woke. These positioned me well to frame learning from the previous day and reframe the stresses present in my mind when I woke. Each section also has some practices to follow throughout the day from questions to ask others in conversations to imagining contingency plans or rescheduling missed opportunities. These practices then can frame the day; small goals that bring awareness to daily work and personal practice. Overall, the book will help you live life a little more mindfully and with purpose.

But the book does not end with you. The book is entirely adaptable for a variety of contexts, and I could easily see these exercises being pulled out for classroom practice, college student self-reflection, and teacher professional development, I even found it fun to practice some of the exercises with friends and family. The fact that they are already in worksheet format also makes it easy to scale them up for more than one person.

This book is not an intellectually heavy lift, and thank goodness, because we don’t need to add more to our plate when we are trying to self-improve. The book is not an added challenge but facilitates the process of building a stronger more resilient version of yourself.

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.

Older posts

Newer posts

The Magic Number

Changing the Focus

A Better Way?

The Very Big Picture

Read This Book If…

Places to Start

Getting Specific

Ready for More

Build Your Own Adventure

Where to Begin?

Good News, with a Twist

Ollie Lovell To The Rescue

Practicing What He Preaches

In Brief

Newsletter & Event Emails