Books on Modern Research
Learning Science and Teaching Techniques
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
The bestselling classic that holds the key to unlocking meaning, creativity, peak performance, and true happiness.
Legendary psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous investigations of “optimal experience” have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life.
In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work, Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives. You can access Jason’s free eBook 5 Tips for Fostering Flow, which how the idea of flow can make a difference in your classroom.
Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel, Make It Stick
To most of us, learning something “the hard way” implies wasted time and effort. Good teaching, we believe, should be creatively tailored to students’ different learning styles and use strategies that make learning easier.
Make It Stick turns fashionable ideas like these on their head. The authors offer concrete techniques for becoming more productive learners based on recent discoveries in cognitive psychology and other disciplines. Memory is central to our ability to carry out complex cognitive tasks, such as applying knowledge to problems never encountered and drawing inferences from known facts. New insights into how memory is encoded, consolidated, and later retrieved have led to a better understanding of how we learn. Grappling with the impediments that make learning challenging leads to more complex mastery and better retention of what was learned.
Glenn Whitman and Ian Kelleher, Neuroteach
Teachers are brain changers. Thus, it would seem evident that understanding the brain, the organ of learning, would be critical to a teacher’s readiness to work with students. Unfortunately, in traditional public, public-charter, private, parochial, and home schools across the country, most teachers lack an understanding of how the brain receives, filters, consolidates, and applies learning for both the short and long term.
Neuroteach was therefore written to help solve the problem that teachers and school leaders have in bringing the growing body of educational neuroscience research into the design of their schools, classrooms, and work with each student.
We hope that Neuroteach will help ensure that one day, every student, regardless of zip code or school type, will learn and develop with the guidance of a teacher who knows the research behind how his or her brain works and learns.
Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion 2.0
Teach Like a Champion 2.0 is a complete update to the international bestseller. This teaching guide is a must-have for new and experienced teachers alike.
With ideas for everything from boosting academic rigor to improving classroom management and inspiring student engagement, you can immediately strengthen your teaching practice. Organized by category and technique, the book’s structure enables you to read from start to finish, or dip in anywhere for the specific challenge you seek to address.
With examples from outstanding teachers, videos, and additional, continuously updated resources at teachlikeachampion.com, you will soon be teaching like a champion. The classroom techniques in this book can be adapted to suit any context.
You can access Kolby’s free eBook The Craft of Teaching, which provides an in-depth analysis of how classical educators can utilize the techniques in TLaC 2.0.
Positive Psychology and Self Improvement
Angela Duckworth, Grit
Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent, but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls “grit.” In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she takes us into the field to visit cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, teachers working in some of the toughest schools, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance.
Carol Dweck, Mindset
After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset—those who believe that abilities are fixed—are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset—those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to fo
Cal Newport, Deep Work
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time.
Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.
In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four “rules,” for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.
Cal Newport, So Good They Can’t Ignore You
In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that “follow your passion” is good advice.
Not only is the cliché flawed-preexisting passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work-but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping. After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do.
Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers.
Daniel Pink, Drive
Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others).
In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world. Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life.
He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.
Elite Performance Research
Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code
In The Talent Code, award-winning journalist Daniel Coyle draws on cutting-edge research to reveal that, far from being some abstract mystical power fixed at birth, ability really can be created and nurtured.
In the process, he considers talent at work in venues as diverse as a music school in Dallas and a tennis academy near Moscow to demonstrate how the wiring of our brains can be transformed by the way we approach particular tasks.
