Education Teaching Books

I found Todd Whitaker's, "What Great Principals Do Differently: Fifteen Things that Matter Most," to be an extremely helpful book. The book's easy to follow format provides practical advice for any new administrator to use. I found Whitaker's book to be a fast read, and I believe any principal or assistant principal can apply concepts from this book to their daily work. From getting the best performance from staff and students, to creating a positive climate in the building, Whitaker gives many practical pieces of advice. Whitaker's focus on teachers being key to school improvement is an obvious solution often overlooked. I would recommend any new principal reading this book.

If you have read "What Good Teachers Do Differently' or visa versa don't buy it. It is almost verbatim and a WASTE of money and time.

Great book, looking to venture into administration soon and was looking for literature to use with potential faculty and staff.

I could not put this book down. Out of all the educational leadership books I've read, this was a simple read with the most applicable suggestions. It is a resource that I can read over again and get more out of it.

I read his other book What Great Teachers Do differently and enjoyed it. It is a quick read and inspires conversation. As a result, I quickly purchased his other book. Unfortunately, most of the chapters were the same but where it read "teacher" in one book it read "principal" in this one. So obviously I was disappointed that I paid for the same book twice. Pick one book for sure. It is worth it. But not both.

Whatever it Takes is an inspirational book that leads educators through the work needed to develop a true Professional Learning Community (PLC). When you have a staff ready to do whatever it takes, you are well on your way to helping ALL students achieve academic success.

I haven't finished this book yet. I found the beginning useful and read it on recommendation of a former principal. There is a lot of talk about secondary schools.

The book has some good points (maybe one and a half stars), but it was difficult to read it due to my eyes rolling at every other sentence.

To James O'Keefe: Right on! I totally agree 100%. You need to write a book! (It might be difficult to get it published though, considering the PLCC has probably got a stronghold on all educational publishing.) Teamwork is great and definitely has its place. But this book is talking about much more than teamwork. It's talking about placing 100% of the blame on teachers and principals. What about the parents? What about the student who won't even try to learn?

Regarding what another reviewer wrote: Well, two comments: First of all, it's funny you mentioned Koolade in your review. Speaking of Koolade: Don't drink it! Too many people already have! (If you don't know what I'm talking about, I suggest you read up on the modern history of cults.) Secondly, speaking of water fountains, I have this to say: You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink it.

One more thing about this book: The authors compare certain teachers (ones who believe in the "horse" metaphor above), to Pontius Pilate. You know, the guy who literally ordered Jesus to be crucified. All I can say is this: I'm a teacher at a low socio-economic school, I work 50-60 hours a week, I get along with my colleagues and students, and yet I do believe in the horse metaphor. The Pontius Pilate metaphor is just a bunch of, well, to put it in educated words, insulting, ridiculous, abusive slander to the teachers and principals who work so hard every single day.

I find it troubling that so much of this author's claim lies at the fountainhead of what he calls learning, but where does he explain what "learning" actually is? He appears to skirt around this issue in every chapter. After reading the book, I am left with the feeling that learning, for DuFour, is something that I do as a teacher when I fill students' heads up with information. I take my pitcher of what-is-to-be-learned and carefully pour it in each student's head. According to DuFour, some heads are not equipped with funnels, so a cadre of teachers assemble to cascade what-is-to-be-learned, pouring waterfall-like liquids of learning over various student heads in the hopes that some of the precious liquid will stay. By the end of twelfth grade, because a deluge of learning has been cast at the students, enough of the learning-liquid should be present for adult proficency. There is one major part about this metaphor that bothers me, though: What role do students play in learning? Again, according to DuFour, students are only vessels to contain learning. To be honest, I've never thought of my students as cups or glasses.

Basic ideas are sound, but I think nothing ground-breaking. I felt that each chapter could have been shortened into a paragraph or two. At most, this should have been an essay. Based on the way the book was written, I got the feeling that the authors were trying to influence the reader much the same way as a cult would try to brainwash a prospective member. While I agree that teachers should teach children to learn, I feel that the student will be in trouble upon graduation as the system of support will be gone. They will have to perform or fail... period. I felt the book to be too wordy, too preachy, too liberal... did I say too wordy?

Understanding by design was recommended to me by one of my teachers. This book helped me understand how to approach lesson planning. Backwards design is an excellent way to design curriculum. The templates are very helpful, and almost mindless even. You just have to know what your goals are, and the templates help you do the rest.
I think they should come up with a computer program to make it even easier, but hey, writing is good practice. I rated it four stars, because I haven't found some of the information int he back too helpful- of course I haven't thoroughly read it. I guess it's there for something, but I'm a stickler for not including unnecessary information.

Clear user friendly guide for effective use of UbD for planning.
Understanding by Design: Professional Development Workbook

This book not only provides clear examples of the work that it supplements, it is effective for planning beyond lessons alone. It enables one to plan for school wide or system level comprehensive approaches. An excellent application of the "Begin With the End in Mind" as advocated by Stephen Covey's work.

I have used this resource again and again when working with teachers who are either just starting out with unit design in a UbD framework, as well as with those who are quite familiar with the model. The templates and other tools are user-friendly and make the application of UbD much more straightforward than using the original text alone.

This book complements in practical form the ideas presented in Understanding by Design (UbD). I am using this book as a guide for the design of courses online in higher education. Both have been a wonderful aid to rationalize the amount of resources that I must include in the courses online that I am developing. They are effective tools to determine in concise form and practices the synchronous or asynchronous activities that must make the learners as it demonstrates the intentions reached from the "big idea". I recommend them widely to obtain the deep learning.

As a homeschooler, I felt I need a book to help guide me to make sure I wasn't leaving anything out of my kids education. This book covers a lot for each grade level. It's a great source of guidance and referrences. But, just because the book SAYS your child should know a certain thing by a certain grade, doesn't mean you HAVE to teach that. Overall, I like the book and continue to use it for reference but I don't live by it.

I am new to homeschooling and this seemed to be a good starting point for establishing what I need my child to cover in the school year. It does not tell you exactly what curriculum to choose for your child's learning style but it does guide you over all the areas children should be knowledgeable in. There are several out of print books that are recommended as well as websites that are not available. It also has some very good information in the appendixes. Overall, I would recommend this book as a great tool.

The main reason that I bought this book was that I am moving more and more toward the mindset of frugal homeschooling. However, using a library can be daunting, when one is not sure which skills and content areas need to be taught. However, with this book and a library card, you can pretty much teach your child for free. She does recommend math programs, but the ones she recommends range from 10.00 per year to expensive 110.00 programs. I believe she has made an excellent balance of skills that need to be covered, and general content areas, as well as a few curriculum tips. She is also open to the needs of different people. While she never taught her children spelling, she also recommends 3 or 4 different spelling programs. She also includes literature and fun books to teach content and skill areas, and in the end, how to prepare for college. This book is better than the Core Knowledge series for me because it's less expensive, goes all the way to 12th grade, and is written specifically for homeschoolers. However I still hope to purchase the What your __Needs to Know Series to use alongside this book.

Homeschooling is much more affordable, efficient and fun when one avoids curriculum, and this book is an excellent tool to make sure you are prepared, organized, and not missing anything important.

I think this book could be helpful for those who have been homeschooling since day one, or are starting at day one, but I can't imagine it helping those who are removing their child from public school, as I am with my daughter. My daughter is half way through her 3rd grade year. I read through the 3rd grade chapter and was completely overwhelmed with everything my daughter did *not* know/had not been taught. And I couldn't believe some of the things the author said should be learned- in 3rd grade? So, for reference I went back to the 2nd grade chapter- almost as bad! And then I started to go to the 1st grade chapter but gave up. The fact is that this book will *not* tell you what children are learning in public schools, although the author does give links for that. It seems to me, from what I know, that this is the "Classical" approach to homeschool (this is never mentioned in the book description, and only very briefly mentioned in the introduction)- which is not what we're doing. I would think that any person pulling their child out of public school would feel as I did- completely overwhelmed & hopeless - there is just too much to "catch up" on! Each year builds upon knowledge from the previous year, and I would think that most private schools don't even measure up to the standards put forth in this book. I do give it two stars because it lists resources for teaching- books and websites mainly, and some curriculum, relating to topics listed. That is all the use this book will be of to me.

Do you want a parent-friendly guide to realistic educational goals for your child at each grade level? This is it. This is another must-have book for me in my venture through homeschooling. How do I know if what my child is learning is typical for their grade? Look it up in here. I did many searches online and kept coming up with grand pages written in dense "teacher-ese" about abstract geometry and linguistic comprehension... for kindergarteners. I need the easy to understand, quick version and this is presicely what I was looking for. There are also excellent resource suggestions listed in here.

I brought this book for my 4 year old granddaughter, and she loves it. The pictures that appear in the maze make it easy to teach the concept of mazes. For example, the first maze has a hedge bordering all sections of the maze. My granddaughter understood following a path when I told her "you can't jump over or go through the hedge". She had so much fun that she just about finished the book in one sitting.

Purchased for my niece and she loves these mazes. Each page is double sided with an easy maze on the front and a harder maze on the back. She finds the harder maze a little difficult so I place numbered clues throughout the maze for her to follow.

She prefers working with the the pages out of the book, which you can do if you work on it a little. Instead of cutting, you can pull the front cover all the way back until the seam is exposed, and remove the pages one by one without ripping any pages.

My son loves these mazes. I've had great luck with all of the Kumon books. This one is really great for teaching pencil skills. It holds my son's interest and the book is structured to give a high success rate - staring with simpler mazes and progressing. I'm a teacher and I'm very impresed with this and all of the other Kumon books I've tried.

This book is pegged for children ages 3 - 5, and that seems about right. My three year old son had a blast working these delightful (and sometimes challenging) mazes. There are 80 mazes in the book, and there is a certificate of achievement at the back of the book.

Highly recommended.

My 3-year old grand daughter loves doing these mazes. It's geared for 3 - 5 year olds and she wants to try all of them. She can do about half but never gets bored.

As the educational jargon increases and changes, it is important to keep abreast of the latest. This book provided information which I really needed

Today the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that although American high school seniors are getting better academic grades, their literacy and mathematics skills are actually regressing. The most likely culprit: grade inflation. Yet the drumbeat among elite educrats to adopt the Professional Learning Communities fad throughout the nation's high schools continues unabated. While PLC is certainly not to blame for the trend documented by these latest NAEP figures (it hasn't been around long enough), its dumbfounding popularity among education reformers is proof that the current educational leadership in this country is not to be trusted. How should we define "academic achievement"? Both PLC and (to a lesser extent) the federal No Child Left Behind law define it as all students performing at the same level and all teachers teaching their subjects the same way. In other words, the goal of PLC is conformity--the exact opposite of what a quality education in a democratic society should stand for.

When teachers and students are pressured to conform to the same standards, it is inescapable that the standards themselves must be mediocre. The kind of school climate advocated by DuFour will only lead to more teachers handing out more A's for less work, or for inferior work. The most gifted and motivated students will have to be ignored because of the constant pressure on teachers to keep the low end of the student population from failing. But what if we started at the high end of the spectrum instead, teaching everything as if it were an honors class? Our brightest and most hardworking students might achieve their full potential and save us all from the intellectual wasteland our country is becoming. The middle and low-end students would have to struggle to keep up. And yes, a lot of them would be likely to fail...at least until they discovered the will to apply themselves and take their own education seriously. It would be a hard lesson for them, but a valuable one in the long run.

Unfortunately, there are no well-funded think-tanks, education professors, or consultants advocating this approach at the moment.

The collaborative work of Richard DuFour (Superintendent of Adlai Stevenson High School District 125, Lincolnshire, Illinois) and Robert Eaker (Dean of the College of Education, Middle Tennessee State University), Professional Learning Communities At Work: Best Practices For Enhancing Student Achievement offers the reader informed and informative information on how to transform any private or public school into a results-oriented "professional learning community" based upon practices from some of the best schools in the country. Professional Learning Communities At Work covers curriculum development, teacher preparation, school leadership, professional development programs, school-parent partnerships, and assessment practices. Of vital interest to education professionals, Professional Learning Communities At Work is completely accessible and highly recommended reading for parents and other non-specialist general readers with an interest in improving their community schools and school systems.

Professional Learning Communities at Work (Best Practices for Enhancing Student Achievement) by Dr. Richard Dufour and Dr. Robert Eaker, is a well-written/user-friendly piece of literature. This book may be useful as a text for graduate and/or post-graduate level students who are studying and/or working within the area of education, administration, and/or curriculum and instruction. It is also an excellent resource to have if you are dealing with staff and/or curriculum development. The basic premise of the book goes about showing how (via PLC's (Professional Learning Communities)/Small Learning Communities) school staff and administration can work collaboratively to help change, redefine, and/or shape their school's mission and goals. Through this teaming process and through the steps/best practices the authors suggest; school improvement, cultural change, and positive curriculum development and implementation can more likely be achieved.

This is a nice book on the important topics related to how people learn. It serves as an introductory text from which you can gather relevant references on the issues that are of the most interest to you.

The copy I bought at Amazon was defective, though. It was missing more than 20 pages!! But after I contacted the publisher, they quickly sent me a replacement book with no charge at all. (I did not try to contact Amazon for fear that the whole Amazon stock is defective in the same way.)

The tome "How Learners Learn" is what your worthless education courses SHOULD have been teaching you, but didn't because the politicians and the professors would rather push their agendas. If the teacher is to actually teach--convey information from one human to another--then the teacher must know how humans acquire information. That's what this book goes into. Oddly, that is also what outfits such as the federal department of education never go into.

Read this book; buy it if you must, borrow it if you can, but read it.

If you are going to be a teacher, this is a great book to read. Detailed and easy to read, it helps prepare you for what to expect and what will be expected of you as a teacher. It makes it easy to understand how children learn and what are the best teaching strategies to use to teach them as individuals.

My academic advisor at the University of Washington's iSchool suggested I read this along with "Team-Based Learning". I never thought I could get so excited about a book on learning from the National Research Council! Highly recommended to anyone with an interest in research regarding neural processes, teaching /learning, psychology, and the natural desire to learn.

Thank you to the authors and contributors for this book! I can hardly wait to see what they find out next!

The beauty of this volume is that it takes a vast quantity of research on how people learn and organizes it in a way which is readable, practical and accessible for educators. The authors distill the findings of numerous studies into three key principles of learning: (1) Teachers must work with student preconceptions and prior knowledge, (2) Teachers must teach in depth, providing multiple examples of the same concept and (3) Teachers must help students develop metacognitive skills so that they can take control of their own learning. These principles are developed and expanded with numerous references to research and practical illustrations. It should be noted that the book is predominantly about conceptual understanding and does not spend a lot of time on how we learn skills such as playing a musical instrument or learning a language. That said, it is an extremely important contribution to discussions of pedagogy and if the advice contained in the book is heeded by teachers, curriculum writers and policy makers, it has the potential to transform many shallow classroom practices into powerful tools that will enable students to develop deep understanding. The accelerating pace of change in the 21st century means that the ability to transfer skills to unfamiliar situations as well as the skills of lifelong learning have become more important than ever. The principles contained in this book will help us prepare students for a changing world.

This is a good and valuable book. It has some limitations that prevent it from being a great book.

The book's strengths are its detailed depiction of the challenges and triumphs of 4 Teach for America teachers in a troubled high school in LA, Locke High School. The book gives a real feeling of the challenges these teachers face because of neighborhood gang problems, the poor academic preparation of many students, and issues with classroom discipline, educational bureaucracy, and the overall atmosphere of the school.

The book also gives a thumbnail depiction of the history and current operations of TFA. This includes a detailed view of how TFA selects "corps members", TFA's philosophy of "teaching as leadership", TFA's developing approach to assessment and curriculum, and TFA's expansion plans. There is also a detailed depiction of the work of the TFA program director who is overseeing the four TFA "CMs" at Locke.

This book would be useful in anyone wanting to understand some of the challenges in the very toughest urban high schools. The book would also be of interest in anyone wanting to understand TFA as an educational reform organization.

The limitation of the book is that it doesn't really explore the broader implications of TFA within American education. For example, the book mentions perceptions by the Locke high school principal, and some of the CMs, that much of the teaching at Locke High School is not good. However, none of this "bad teaching" is shown or explored. The focus is narrowly on the challenges and triumphs of the TFA teachers.

As another example, the book does not explore whether it is possible for TFA to really be the way to radically transform American education, and how. TFA currently selects relatively few applications from a highly select group of idealistic college students. It then does a unique boot camp kind of training. To what extent is any of this replicable on a broad scale? This is unclear, and is not adequately explored in the book. Perhaps TFA's most important future role in American education will be as a way of getting some highly talented people into education, where they can play a key role as educational leaders.

Fantastic and un-biased look into Teach for America as an organization, both from the employer and employee perspectives. Revealing discussion of the achievement gap between America's rich and poor communities, even today.

As a second-year Teach for America corps members, this book is the perfect answer to an experience that can not truly be understood by anyone outside the TFA community. After years of trying to explain the experience to family and friends (and failing, time and time again), I was amazed after only one chapter how right on Donna Foote got it. It was like someone was right there with me starting at Institute and then heading into the classroom in the fall. For any corps member who needs validation their feelings of failure and defeat, needs a reminder as to why they signed up for this in the first place, or just needs a sense of who else is going through what they're going through, this book is for you. HIGHLY recommended!

I happen to love the language employed by the media when talking about education. War metaphors are most popular and eye-catching. "At the front," and "in the trenches" capture one's attention. One thinks of sweet little Princeton grads in gas masks, armed with bayonets being charged by thousands of black kids screaming "whitey." No wonder so many Teach for America alumni write books; they are like war veterans. Some are too traumatized to ever speak of their ordeal again, while others are turned into overnight Hemingways. I was down there in Watts, too, having the time of my life, but I didn't see the same things these TFA kids saw. What I remember is the counselor who drove a white Rolls Royce to school, and walked around campus in her Sunday best. Or the coordinator of school funds who drove a gold Mercedes onto campus, parked daily in front of his office, and dared the school police to give him a ticket. I remember watching the kids take a single bite out of their hot dogs, hamburgers, pizzas or burritos and then throw the leftovers over their shoulders on to the cafeteria floor. Staff spent an hour scooping up the garbage using snow shovels every day after "nutrition" and lunch. And how could I forget Dr. Princess, the computer coordinator, who spent everyday locked in her office surfing the net. Kids would walk around campus throwing their unopened orange juice cartons against the classroom walls and screamed wildly when the juice splattered and rained over their classmates. I'd tell the kids to open to page 112 in their "The American Experience" textbook, only to watch in horror as they tore the pages out, made paper wads, and told me they didn't have page 112, so could we watch a movie? Houses sell for $400,000 down in Watts. There were kids with parents in dubious lines of work, but then again no more dubious than those of our substitute teachers. I never met a kid who didn't have $20 to blow on the latest movie at the Magic Johnson Theatre. They were poor, all right, but not in the sense that they lacked money. What is difficult in Watts as is true of many working class neighborhoods in Southern California is that there is no model for work that is glamorous enough to compete with Hollywood. Gambling is cool, buying lotto tickets makes sense, but not work. When the black counselor attempted to revive the long-abandoned horticulture department by asking kids to clean out the greenhouses, the head of the English department charged him with trying to revive slavery. There is no honor in labor; work is seen as a sign or weakness. Basketball playing is seen as worthy, rapping, drug-dealing: they're manly. But study is simply out of the question. You can paint signs on the school house saying, "All Children Can Learn" all you want, but somebody has to tell the kids to do their homework.

On the book sleeve, the publishers promise that Relentless Pursuit does not "romanticize" tbe successes or failures of these four TFA teachers, but, unfortunately it does. Even worse, the writer's obsession with how dangerous Watts and Locke high school is (it seems like her caveats are on every page) grates on the sensibilities of this reader and clouds the best part of her writing, the research and history of the school and Teach For America. As a former administrator at Locke intimately familiar with Phillip, Hroag, Taylor and the school, I'm appalled at how the writer paints the students as so horrible, savage,ignorant, and deprived that a mere compliment doled out by their teacher would be the first in their "very deprived" lives. Or, how they obsess over the beautiful white skin of their teachers or their personal lives. Her white paternalism and superficial understanding of Locke, Principal Wells, and the rest of the teaching staff would have one believe that the fault only lies with the larger district and that Wells is a savior battling the big, bad district who oppresses a committed black man. Truth be told, Wells was despised by most of his staff and teachers--TFA included-- for his tyrannical behavior, his inability to tell any short-skirt wearing TFAer or any female on campus for that matter "NO." His dysfunctional obsession of giving his friends everything (think sports teams and female teachers who flirt with him)bankrupted the student body fund, sucked out all the SAIT money for instruction and misdirected Federal monies and all of the local district cash for his personal hero worshipping indulgences. His Saul-like transformation came because he was given his walking papers in March, long before the May 3 temper tantrum. Even worse, the next year he asked gang bangers to come on campus and start fights (which they gladly did) so he, in his dilusional thinking, would be begged by the district to "save" Locke again! Sick! Also disgusting is the one-sided commercial feel for TFA that Foote writes about. Her "balanced" criticism of the organization is quick generalizations with no depth to the destruction the organization has on schools like Locke. Read the book? Naw, just watch Stand and Deliver or Lean on Me and save yourself some time. This story is a rerun of many of the other blown-out, glorified stories of inner-city school successes brought to you by John Wayne mavericks.

This a pretty good very thick book. It really is like a book with a curriculum it has mostly everything you need. It really takes the guess work out what to teach them before they go to school. Some of things included were: opposites, rhyming, colors, shapes, matching, one to one, and writing/tracing. I think any kid would like it.

I purchased this book to work with my 3 year old on preparing her for preschool and it's really great, we go over the alphabet, shapes, colors and tracing letters daily, also opposites and other writing development activities, in just a few lessons I noticed she was already making strides in recognizing the letters, picking out opposites and ryming words. Excellent and well worth the money if you are a stay at home Mom like me, (or even if you aren't) it's a great activity to work on daily with your child.

The book i received was not the one previewed but i do like the one we got.

I bought this book for my 3 year old- she loves it- it is easy for her to understand. I would have given this book 5 stars but, when it has you trace words it is all in small letters and most everything I read says to teach your kids capital letters first and then introduce small letters. That is my only complaint though!

As others have said, it's massive. It has tons and tons of activity worksheets that are easily ripped out. My son is homeschooling and for difficult areas, I can remove one of these worksheets, copy it and have him work on it several times until he is ready to move on. He loves tracing, so I removed a few of these pages and copied them. He can now use them over and over for practice and fun. I am VERY impressed with this and recommend it to anyone.