Students don’t like school because we don’t create the right cognitive conditions for learning. Bill Ivey reviews Dan Willingham’s book, Why Don’t Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom.
Teacher librarian Lorri Kingan recommends Bryan Harris’s book, Battling Boredom – 99 Strategies to Spark Student Engagement, and its clever, simple-to-implement strategies to all teachers looking for ways to promote active student learning.
Reviewer and math teacher Michelle Schwartze says the eight essential elements for school-wide math success identified by Chris Confer and Marco Ramirez in Small Steps, Big Changes: Eight Essential Practices for Transforming Schools Through Mathematics ring true.
In Amy Benjamin’s Math in Plain English: Literacy Strategies for the Mathematics Classroom, says reviewer Shelly Sims, there’s finally a book combining literacy strategies with what we know about math thinking and problem-solving.
Book Reviews / Visual & Media Literacy
by MiddleWeb · Published 09/29/2012 · Last modified 11/13/2019
Visual literacy is vital skill for iGeneration students, says reviewer Patricia Thomas-Jeanig. She recommends Steve Moline’s See What You Mean: Visual Literacy K-8 (2nd Edition) which explores many kinds of visual texts and includes great teaching ideas.
Reviewer Rebecca Crockett praises Charles Fuhrken’s What Every Middle School Teacher Needs to Know About Reading Tests (From Someone Who Has Written Them), a book of practical, teaching-friendly advice about prepping students for reading tests.
Bill Bigelow’s teacher-friendly book, The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration, offers concrete strategies & teaching resources to help students understand immigration and globalization issues, says reviewer Kelly Moser.
How to Teach Thinking Skills Within the Common Core: Seven Student Proficiencies of the New National Standards may be too structurally complex to be a valuable everyday resource to the classroom educator, but there’s plenty to admire, says reviewer Kevin Hodgson.
This powerful guide for PK-8 educators, Interactive Modeling: A Powerful Technique for Teaching Children by Margaret Berry Wilson, can help improve our teaching of essential academics, social skills, routines and behaviors, says reviewer Linda Biondi.
Special ed teacher Laura Von Staden, mom of two children with ADHD, says this otherwise useful book, The Energetic Brain: Understanding and Managing ADHD, lacks the detail about specific interventions teachers need.
