Category Archives: Book Reviews

Teaching is an emotionally and cognitively demanding job, a fact that the public does not always appreciate. To cope with these demands and help teachers feel and do their best inside and outside of the classroom Tina Boogren encourages teachers to engage in self-care by attending to their physiological and emotional needs in their daily life and relationships. Boogren, an esteemed educator, instructional coach, and author of several books about teaching and student motivation, wrote Take Time for You: Self-Care Action Plans for Educators. This book, organized around Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, is full of helpful strategies and thought-provoking reflection questions for leading a balanced and fulfilled life. Examples are targeted to educators, but this guide can be useful for any individual wishing to better himself. Readers are encouraged to review strategies for addressing needs and opportunities for growth, select appealing strategies, create a plan to deploy those strategies, monitor progress, and reflect both independently and with supportive others about the experience of engaging in self-care.

Boogren first encourages those on a self-care journey to understand their needs and reflect about how they spend their time. The first rung on her self-care ladder involves attending to one’s basic physiological needs for water, food, exercise, rest, and shelter.  She suggests that people can better attend to their physiological needs by, for example, drinking more water, planning healthy meals, scheduling exercise, removing electronics from the bedroom, and washing hands frequently.

The second need to be satisfied relates to being and feeling safe. Predictability, fairness, and preparation all contribute to feelings of safety. To increase safety and feelings of safety one can keep a schedule, write about feelings, learn and practice emergency safety procedure, and regularly schedule medical appointments. Additionally, people need to feel as though they belong to a group or community. Boogren urges readers to intentionally build relationships with colleagues and focus on being present when spending time with loved ones. Finally, people have esteem related needs.  We all want to feel appreciate and recognized. Those with healthy self-esteem believe in themselves, know what they want in life, accept compliments gracefully, communicate well with others and can learn from their mistakes. They do not gossip excessively, compare themselves to others, brag, or take large and impulsive risks. To build esteem one can reframe self-relevant thoughts to be more positive, set realistic expectations, and recite self-affirmations, especially during stressful times.

While needs related to bodily comfort, safety, belong, and esteem all stem from avoiding negative experiences, the final two needs that Boogren discusses—self-actualization and transcendence—pertain to a desire for opportunities for personal growth, realizing one’s potential, and connecting to communities and ideals beyond the self. Am I living my best life? Reflecting on this question, according to Boogren, can help one achieve self-actualization. The self-actualized individual can accept uncertainty and emotional complexity, feel appreciation, and demonstrate creativity. Choosing work that one loves, removing distractions, and training focus can help people experience immersive flow states in which they are completely focused on and happily pursuing a clear goal. When one has sufficiently satisfied each of the preceding needs, one can engage in the transformational experience of transcendence, or connecting to a higher purpose. Although transcendent experiences are hard to achieve, Boogren suggests that feeling inspired by books, movies, or music, cultivating feelings of gratitude (e.g., through writing thank you notes), meditating, volunteering, donating, and being kind and compassionate can all help.

This guide to developing a personalized self-care plan can help prevent burn-out and help individuals feel good. Self-care aids educators and other professionals in bringing themselves fully to their work and relationships and realizing their potential.

Boogren, T. H. (2018). Take Time for You: Self-Care Action Plans for Educators. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.

New York University Professor and National Academy of Sciences member Joseph LeDoux recently published The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. He argues that understanding the evolutionary history of life on earth, which began 3.8 billion years ago, can help us understand ourselves, including our emotions and conscious experience. LeDoux reviews the organization and interrelation of species and discusses major evolutionary breakthroughs along the way to human consciousness. All life forms share certain basic survival behaviors—including managing resources, warding off harm, and reproducing–that were passed on from the last universal common ancestor. Although our mental life and its connection to behavior may be evolutionary byproducts of other selection pressures, our cognitive abilities have emerged as our unique advantage. LeDoux argues that our ability to engage in conscious thought can make us selfish and greedy, but it is also our best hope for combating looming challenges in our world to support our continued survival as a species.

The Deep History of Ourselves offers an overview of evolutionary history that is at once thorough and approachable. It wades into our ongoing quest to understand human consciousness by advancing sophisticated ideas about what consciousness is, how we got it, and why it matters. This book will be of interest to a general audience seeking to understand how, evolutionarily, humans came to be creatures who can think and feel emotions, including about the self.

LeDoux reviews the science showing that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago and that the first life form emerged 3.8 billion years ago when inorganic elements exposed to tremendous heat became biological compounds. Bacteria, which emerged 3.5 billion years ago, are the evolutionarily oldest life forms that still exist today. Bacteria have developed the ability to survive and proliferate in a great diversity of contexts. Unlike bacteria, eukaryotes can reproduce sexually, which was a major innovation in that it allowed for greater genetic diversity.

LeDoux then discusses bilateral symmetry which about 99% of animals have at some point in their development. Bilaterality contributed to greater mobility and more complex predator-prey relations. Bilateral animals typically have neurons that facilitate communication across long distances in the body and integrate sensory-motor information. Neurons support more sophisticated and flexible learning.

Spines were another major evolutionary change.  Vertebrates, which have spines, are a diverse group who trace their origins to an aquatic animal. Some major evolutionary developments among groups of vertebrates including the ability to breath oxygen from air rather than water, the ability to reproduce through intercourse, the ability to gestate young in an internal placenta, the four-chambered heart, and improved color vision and smell. Charles Darwin helped us come to understand that humans are related to and exist along a continuum with other animals.

About ten thousand years ago Homo sapiens began to dominate. LeDoux describes the components of our central nervous system, including that the hindbrain may support evolutionarily old reflexive behavior while the forebrain is responsible for evolutionarily newer cognition, learning, and memory. Cognition, according to LeDoux, is a biological process made possible by the nervous system. Our ability to hold information in mind, recognize patterns, and deliberate about and select among possibilities are among our advantageous cognitive skills. LeDoux draws on the work of other prominent scholars to show that we have become so smart not only because of these cognitive skills, but also because of cultural tools and knowledge, especially language, which have allowed us to efficiently amass and share knowledge across generations. These cultural forces even shape our conscious awareness of the self.

Departing from other prominent consciousness scholars, LeDoux argues that our subjective feeling experience is equivalent to our emotions. He argues that we cannot have unconscious emotions, but that nonconscious factors do contribute to the experience of emotion. LeDoux argues that much of the time we are not consciously aware of what we are doing, but that being able to take conscious control of our actions, and use that to transcend the present moment and build an understanding of the self, is a powerful ability. The front most part of the brain—the frontal pole—plays a key role in these sorts of highly integrative, complex experiences. Although other animals do have minds that can think, plan, and remember, and although all species share certain survival-related activities, it is difficult to know which animals have consciousness. Emotions, according to LeDoux, indicate that something significant is happening to you. We have a sense of self because it allows us to build personally relevant meaning through our emotional experiences of dynamic situations.

The Deep History of Ourselves is an important book because understanding human consciousness is critical given that our future as a species depends on our ability to use our conscious minds to address imminent global and environmental threats.

LeDoux, J. (2019). The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Conscious Brains. New York, NY: Viking

One of the most effective ways to enhance students’ learning is by clarifying what the students should know and modeling how they can come to know those things. John Almarode, a former K-12 teacher and current associate professor at James Madison University, and Kara Vandas, a teacher, author, and educational consultant, recently published Clarity for Learning: Five Essential Practices that Empower Students and Teachers. Those five practices for promoting clarity in the classroom include: 1) crafting learning intention and success criteria; 2) co-constructing those criteria with learners; 3) offering opportunities for students to demonstrate comprehension; 4) giving and receiving feedback about students’ learning; and 5) collaborating with students and other educators to continue to improve teaching and learning.

Almarode and Vandas argue that, when classroom decisions are made with intentionality to promote learning, students should be able to identify what they are learning, why they are learning it, and how they will know that they have learned it. The authors are clear in their writing to promote teachers’ learning. For example, they begin each chapter with a statement of what readers can learn from it. They include guiding questions, reflection exercises, and detailed real-world models of successful clarity interventions.

Almarode and Vandas explain there are multiple ways that teachers are commonly unclear. They may craft learning experiences that are disconnected from the learning outcomes or where a fun activity takes precedence over the larger message the activity is intended to communicate. Teachers may use strategies that are poorly aligned with students’ needs. They may fail to monitor students’ learning or fail to use assessment data to inform how to modify their teaching or enhance their students’ learning.

The first step to gaining clarity is explicating what students are expected to learn. These learning intentions should be communicated to students in age-appropriate language. Doing so may make students more willing to engage with the learning process and develop a greater sense of ownership of their learning. Teachers should also help students monitor their progress and the effectiveness of their learning strategies, appreciate why that progress matters, and understand what else they might learn next. Modeling, demonstrating expectations for success, or offering examples, are effective way of providing clarity. Apprenticeships can make the thinking process visible while gradually and with practice and reflection bestowing more responsibility on the student. As students progress, the initial expectations of what they should learn and how they will demonstrate learning will need to be modified.

Giving students purposefully designed opportunities, whether formal or informal, to demonstrate their learning and make visible their thinking is an important tool for teaching with clarity. These opportunities to demonstrate learning should draw on students’ personal experiences, offer options of different ways to demonstrate learning, feel important to the students, and matter for a purpose beyond a good grade. They should be an authentic, engaging, active learning experience and a safe place to make mistakes. These opportunities to demonstrate learning help teachers see the learning experience from their students’ perspective. Indeed, students, perhaps more than anyone else, can provide teachers with insights into how to enhance the students’ learning.

Almarode and Vandas show that feedback is an important part of the learning process for teachers and students. To be most effective, feedback should be given in a timely manner, it should explicate what needs to be improved, and it should be delivered in a constructive tone. Too much feedback can stymie students. Teachers should recognize that students provide one another extensive feedback. Teachers can become involved in this process to make that feedback most helpful for students’ learning.

Although teachers are the final actors creating clarity in the classroom, that clarity is most likely to be achieved—and learning accelerated—when students, teachers, and school leaders all collaborate. Teachers can reflect about their teaching practices, look for signs of a lack of clarity, discuss with their colleagues about how to support learning, and request help and feedback from school leadership about the clarity of their teaching.

Almarode and Vandas offer a clear and compelling guide for educators to promote clarity in the classroom. With the school year starting soon, this book can help teachers set themselves up for a year of effective teaching.

Almarode, J., & Vandas, K. (2018). Clarity for learning: Five essential practices that empower students and teachers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Andrew C. Watson, the editor of Learning and the Brain Blog, long-time teacher at some of the country’s most prestigious schools, and consultant to educators around the world, recently released his second book in the Learning Brain series. While the first book in the series focused on working memory and attention and the final book in the series will focus on long-term memory, Learning Grows: The Science of Motivation for the Classroom Teacher focuses on growth mindsets and stereotype threat. Watson synthesizes the vast research on these two topics in a comprehensive and comprehensible manner. He recognizes that teachers are experts in motivating others. As such, he offers helpful, innovative, research-backed motivation strategies that teachers might employ to reduce the impact of societal stereotypes on students’ performance and help students learn to try harder after setbacks.

Interestingly, psychologists have found that moderate difficulty when initially learning a topic can lead to greater understanding and better long-term retention. Unfortunately, some students, regardless of intelligence, do not respond to difficulty by becoming eager to work hard and learn more; instead, some students feel embarrassed or angry when learning feels difficult, and they may give up. Since the 1970s Carol Dweck has been examining students’ explanations of difficulty and the implications for effort and success in school. She and others have found that students who believe that intelligence can increase with effort are likely to work harder. Ultimately, they perform better in school than students who believe abilities are fixed. Watson explains that neuroscientific evidence has corroborated the existence of growth and fixed mindsets by demonstrating that while people with growth mindsets activate areas of the brain that support cognitive processing when they are learning after mistakes, people with fixed mindsets activate error detection areas.

For teachers one important implication of this work is that feedback educators give students shapes how they interpret future successes and struggles. When we provide feedback about students’ learning strategies and effort, rather than about innate qualities of them as students (e.g., when we praise with verbs rather than nouns), we signal that learning is a process and with dedication students can continue to achieve higher levels of success regardless of their current skills. Watson encourages teachers to normalize the experience of struggle in school by, for example, discussing previous students’, famous people’s, or the students’ own previous struggles and ultimate successes.

Watson says that we should minimize the consequences of both correct and incorrect answers to questions. Teachers might even acknowledge that they have made a mistake by wasting students’ time if they ask the students to do work that the students can complete flawlessly. Grading policies can also signal a growth mindset classroom culture. Watson recommends policies such as allowing students to set their own deadlines and revise graded work for credit, emphasizing feedback more than grades, and weighting later assignments more heavily than earlier ones. Additionally, exposing students to the idea that they can contribute to the development of new knowledge shows them that people at every stage need to be learners and that knowledge is dynamic.

While an individual’s mindsets can shape his performance in school, so too can his perception of the beliefs of others about his ability to perform. Claude Steele coined the term “stereotype threat” in the mid-1990s to describe how making salient a stereotype-relevant part of an individual’s identity, during a difficult task, in a domain that the individual cares about, can cause the person to perform worse on the task. The fear of confirming the stereotype can make the individual hypervigilant, stressed, and distracted, and it can reduce his working memory.

Watson highlights research that has shown that reducing the salience of stereotyped identities, highlighting non-stereotyped or positively-stereotyped aspects of identity, affirming one’s values and sense of belonging, and reattributing feelings of stress to external sources (rather than doubts about others’ perceptions of oneself) can reduce stereotype threat effects. Additionally, teachers can reduce stereotype threat effects during testing by reframing tests as opportunities to learn, structuring tests to start with sections where students have strengths, and prefacing critical feedback with a message of hope about the teachers’ belief in the students’ ability to improve.

The Learning Brain series is an approachable, practical, and informative series for expert and novice teachers alike. It is likely to help all educators better understand and reflect on their practices so that they can grow in their ability to serve students.

Watson, A.C. (2019). Learning Grows: The Science of Motivation for the Classroom Teacher. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield.