Hi there! This is a list of the books, articles, videos, and so on that I often mention when going through the five key beliefs with a group of colleagues. Folks often ask me for this, so I finally put it all together into one place. Here you go!
Books
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
McKeown is a champ at cutting through the chatter. He's not writing about education at all, but every page of the book feels like it's aimed right at our unfocused and over-complicated school system. This one helps me dial it in and get back to my Everest.
These 6 Things: How to Focus Your Teaching on What Matters Most (Corwin Literacy)
The person who learns the most from any book is its author. I am still grateful for the things I learned about our work and our practice while writing this over half a decade or so of my career. Cherished by colleagues of ours all around the world.
The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers
No biography has had a bigger impact on my heart and mind than this one. It's not a long book, but it's a deep one. Written by a long-time correspondent of Rogers', focused on the spiritual life that the screen didn't show.
Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning
Perhaps the crowning moment of my career as a writer was being cited in this book. No other book in education affected my career as much as Mike's did. He is one of our sages. While you might not always agree with him, you've got to admire his heart and clarity.
Visible Learning for Teachers: Maximizing Impact on Learning
This book is suuuuuper wonky, but it's sold a million plus copies fro a reason. John Hattie and his team did an enormous amount of meta-analysis and ranked 200+ edu-factors by effect size. Very high on the list = teacher credibility.
Mere Christianity
C. S. Lewis is an apologetics exemplar -- that is, he's a champ at winsomely, kindly, intelligently, passionately, and playfully making the case for a controversial view. I recommend him because we have are faced with a similar task -- we're apologists for the view that an education is an inherentlly good and beautiful and powerful thing to have.
Articles
- Here's the 80-page critical literature review by the Chicago Consortium on School Research — it's called “Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners”
- Here's the Pew Forum survey re: where Americans find a sense of meaning
- Here's the Hattie and Purdie study re: conceptions of learning
- Here's the John Wooden story about the shoe tying lesson
- Here's the article where I describe how I teach my students to take notes
- Here's the article where I describe how I prove to students that they can memorize things