This file is a description of some books related to teaching that have particularly influenced me. The bibliographical info may or may not be right: I don't own copies of all of these books. (With luck, I've got the authors and titles right.) I read some of these books a while ago and don't have copies of most of them at hand, so the capsule descriptions may be wildly inaccurate at times.
Update June 28, 2006 - this is quite out of date. But I still love Alfie Kohn.
I'm a big fan of Alfie Kohn's books: he says things which sound very sensible; they're often new ideas to me or ways of thinking about things that I hadn't considered before; I would like much of what he claims to be true; and he actually has studies to back up his claims. Many of his books aren't specific to education; rather, they consider a phenomenon in various different contexts (typically school, work, and home). If you want an introduction to his ideas, he has a new collection of essays called What to Look for in a Classroom; it might be a good starter, though it doesn't have as much meat in them as the books listed below (especially the first two). I'm listing some of his books that I most like in the order of publication (which is also the order in which I read them):
This is a book on using cooperative techniques instead of competitive ones in various situations (including school and work). Basically, he claims that cooperative techniques almost always work better, and has a fair amount of evidence to back himself up. This was the first of the books in this bibliography that I read (I heard about it from a file in the GNU Emacs distribution; I believe it was the file etc/MOTIVATION). This book was the place that I first heard about cooperative learning; make sure that you get the second (1992) edition, since the chapter on cooperative learning was added in that edition.
This book talks about how rewarding people to perform tasks actually can make them do those tasks less well. Bascially, the idea is that rewarding people creates an extrinsic motivator; but extrinsic motivation doesn't work nearly as well as intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivators can actually reduce intrinsic motivation. It discusses this in the context of work, school, and home. For an introduction to the themes of this book, see the etc/MOTIVATION file that I mentioned above.
This book is about discipline in classrooms (typically pre-college, especially elementary). Classrooms typically have a quite strong dominance hierarchy, where the teachers get to tell the students what to do and the students have to do that. This book discusses this hierarchy, its necessity or lack thereof, whom it benefits, how it helps or hinders learning, and how it might have arisen.
I'm having real doubts about classrooms as a general model for learning; some of the best books for showing how learning can occur in other contexts, and often more effectively, are books about homeschooling.
Update June 28, 2006: Apparently when I wrote this, I hadn't read any John Holt. I've since read all of his books, and heartily recommend (most of) them.
This book is about the philosophy of homeschooling called "unschooling", which involves letting your kid do what she finds interesting, with the parents providing support, guidance, and somebody to talk to as needed. The idea behind that is that kids are naturally very interested in learning, so as long as you don't put road blocks in their way (which traditional schooling arguably often does), they'll learn a lot on their own. It's targeted towards teenagers, though after reading it, I thought that I could stand some such liberation myself. Not the book for adults who are unsure about the whole idea. She also has another book that I've read, Real Lives, which has eleven chapters written by homeschooling teenagers describing their lives.
This is a general introduction to homeschooling. I thought that it was quite sensible, and it's probably the book that I would give to people who were curious about the idea but resistant to it.
This is a collection of essays about homeschooling, usually the more anarchist versions of it. It has sections of older essays on why school is bad, more recent essays on why school is bad, essays on homeschooling and how it works, and essays on (relatively) school-like non-school options. Good if you want to see a variety of authors.
This section is for books that don't fit well in a group with other books listed here. I expect that, as I read more and add more books to this bibliography, new sections will get created that many of the books listed here fit into.
This is a book on groupwork (a.k.a. "active learning" or "cooperative learning"); it has lots of useful, concrete suggestions for how to integrate groupwork into your classes and lots of tables giving evidence for why groupwork works. And probably lots of other stuff. It's written in a rather untraditional style; I suspect that they wanted to target it for an "active reader". This is the most useful groupwork book that I've found so far.
An excellent book, with a perhaps unfortunate title. The author was curious as to why science courses seem to drive away all but the most die-hard students; thus, she hired seven humanities grad students to take intro science courses, and this book tells those students' thoughts on their experience. Basically, they wish that there were more of a narrative/big picture to the course, more discussion, and less of the narrow focus, tecnique-based problem sets, and competetive, isolated nature of student interactions. A good book to read when thinking about what students "really" want out of science courses.
This book is about thinking about the teaching process and getting feedback on it. Not my fave, but it has some interesting ideas; if you love introspection, this is the book for you. The one concrete thing that I got out of this book was a questionnaire that he suggests that I've found helpful to use in class.
This is a collection of essays on the philosophy of mathematics. The general theme is what to do now that the Platonist/formalist/intuitionist distinctions of earlier in the century are getting a bit old. They have their problems (Gödel's Theorem for formalism, of course; the complaints of intuitionists don't seem to ever have found much of an audience; and Platonism has obvious problems), they never corresponded well to mathematical practice, and it's not at all clear that they should, anyways. This volume doesn't propose any unified solution, but has lots of essays that give one food for thought. The second edition has three articles that weren't in the first edition; I'd advise you to look for it in preference to the first edition mostly because of Thurston's article on Proof and Progress in Mathematics (which you can also find in Bulletin of the AMS 30 (1994) no. 2, 161-177).
Last modified: Wed Jun 28 17:35:39 PDT 2006