Summer is here!!! Well, actually for me I still have 8 more weeks to go because summer doesn’t arrive until August in Japan. I am really enjoying all of your summer pictures on Facebook though. When August does get here, I fully intend to continue improving my teaching by reading. I love reading, in fact, I read every day rain or shine, busy or not. My day simply does not feel complete unless I have read at least a few pages. I read a lot of books about teaching English as a Second Language but I also read books in lots of other fields. Often I find that those books give me insights into English teaching that are profound and help shape my teaching practices. I want to share with you some of the books I have read this year that are not specifically written for English teachers and how they have either changed how I teach, or changed how I think about teaching. So, go on, grab one of these books and head to wherever you find peaceful and conducive to reading.
1. Connectome
by Sebastian Seung
How I became acquainted with this book
Long before I read this book, I came across a TED talk entitled “I am my Connectome” given by the author. I loved how he was able to explain incredibly complicated concepts in a clear, easy to understand way using metaphors and a great sense of humor. I showed the talk to my father who then found the book and introduced it to his book club. When they were finished, he sent it to me.
What you will learn by reading this book.
This book is all about the brain, and I love reading about the brain. It was written by a neuroscientist who is studying how the brain is wired together. So far, they are examining a mouse brain and discovering just how complex it really is. It explains how our experiences and thoughts cause the neurons in our brains to form branches and connect with each other causing us to learn. These branches can multiply or die depending on how much we use them and what we either choose to practice or are forced to endure. Every single one of our experiences causes our neurons to change shape and connectedness with other neurons and all of this put together creates our identities. No two brains can be the same because even if we experienced the exact same things at the exact same times in our lives, we experienced them slightly differently. For example, if we are both looking at a leaf blow in the wind, I will be seeing it from a slightly different perspective that you will be seeing it from. My favorite metaphor in the book is that our connectomes are like stream beds. They guide our thoughts just as a stream bed guides the waters of a stream but just as the water of a stream shape the course of the stream, our thoughts also shape our connectomes.
How this has changed the way I think about teaching
This book really made me think about teaching differently. As teachers, we are not just helping students learn something, we are physically changing how our students’ brains are connected together. In doing so we are changing who they are in significant ways. When we encourage our students to read for example, we are expanding and strengthening that area of the brain; when we ask our students to solve problems, memorize vocabulary, listen for different phonemes, all of those things are changing the way our students think.
This is similar to what a surgeon does when he goes in and changes what is happening inside someone’s body and it is important. Teaching is not something to be taken lightly but rather something profound that can have lasting effects, both positive and negative, in our students’ lives. By changing the way someone thinks, even in a small way, we are changing who they are and the decisions they will make in their lives. This is profound. I will never again think that what I do doesn’t matter. Teaching is a great joy for me, but it is also a great responsibility and I feel privileged to be doing it.
2. The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion
by Sarah Rose Cavanagh
I found this book while doing one of my favorite things browsing in a bookstore, a brick and mortar bookstore. More specifically, it was the Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle, Washington. I love the feeling of being surrounded by books, picking them up and leafing through them. I hope they never disappear because losing them would be losing one of my refuges.
What you will learn by reading it:
This book also touches on neuroscience but with a focus on emotions. It is organized in such a way that the research is presented in plain text but each chapter has a variety of practical classroom activities that teachers can take into the classroom with them presented in highlighted boxes. These boxes give advice and ideas for everything from how to give your students more control over their own learning to how to use humor effectively.
The author’s driving argument is that learning should not be dry and uninspiring. Teachers need to be aware of the powerful part that emotions play in the learning process and use that knowledge to create more effective learning environments for their students. Far from being distracting, emotions bring meaning to learning, help people retain knowledge and make students curious to know more. With research and strong evidence to back up her claims, the author has put together a handbook of sort for what makes good teaching. It is accessible, well-organized and clearly applicable.
There are many ideas in this book for how to bring your English classes alive and make them truly effective for your students as well as advice for how to take care of yourself as a teacher. For example, the book starts out with advice about how to take care of our minds and bodies in spite of all the things we must accomplish on a daily basis. It also encourages mindful teaching and bringing humor into the classroom. It concludes with ideas for how to battle student procrastination, social loafing and test anxiety. It is focused on secondary and higher learning but there are ideas here that could be applicable to all ages.
How this has Changed the Way I Think About Teaching
I have always believed that teaching and learning are emotional acts but this book made me think more about how I could purposely use emotion in my classrooms. By becoming aware of the role emotion plays in memory, motivation and ultimately how successful students are, I am better able to design courses that use emotions to their best advantage.
3. Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning
by Brown, Reedier and McDaniel
This book came to me from a large box of discarded books in the trash-room of my building. I can’t stand to see books thrown away, so I brought them upstairs with me where they sat on a shelf patiently while I read all of the other books on my shelves. I kept buying new books and not getting around to this bunch of books I had not selected myself, until one day when I decided that I was not allowed to buy another book until I finished all of the books I currently owned. This took me a little over a year to accomplish but I am so glad I did. Reading books that I didn’t choose expanded my thinking and brought me so many new ideas.
What you will learn by reading this book.
Make it Stick is all about memory and how to learn more efficiently. The premise of this book is that purposeful learning is not something that we just do naturally but rather something that must in and of itself be learned. There are effective and ineffective ways of learning and the goal of this book is to teach us what those effective ways are. The authors of this book are big proponents of quizzing yourself in order to memorize material. They encourage spaced repetition, the practice of retrieving information in short bursts rather than prolonged study sessions. The brain needs time to start to forget for learning to be effective so learning something like vocabulary is best done by quizzing yourself starting out in shorter intervals and spacing out that retrieval as your memory of that information becomes more solidified.
They also examine popular pedagogical ideas like learning styles by looking at what research has been done to support them. They found that research does not support the idea that we all have a certain learning style in which we learn best but rather that subjects that lend themselves to different styles should be taught that way. The idea of the existence of different kinds of intelligences however, is better supported by research. Gardner’s theory of 8 intelligences is less supported by research than Sternberg’s more consolidated version that boils it down to three: analytical, creative and practical.
How this Has changed the way I think about teaching
This book really drove home to me the idea that teaching involves a lot more than just the subject material. Students usually lack the skills they need to learn efficiently and effectively and as teachers, it is part of our job to become educated in effective study habits so we can teach our students how to study better. I remember as a student spending hours pouring over books feeling like I was learning, only to find that I could not readily recall what I had read. I wish I had come across this book when I was studying, it would have saved me countless hours of ineffective toil. I hope to save my students this agony by showing them effective study strategies and habits.
4. The Geography of Thought
by Richard E. Nisbett
This book was written by a psychologist about how people think differently in different cultures. I came across this book on one of the bookshelves at work. I share an office with 6 other teachers. Each teacher has a private bookshelf and then there are several public bookshelves. It used to be that the public bookshelf contained strictly novels and not very many of them. Recently however more and more books of all genres have been popping up as we cull our own private collections in order to make room for new additions. I am not sure who contributed this book but I found it fascinating.
What you will Learn by Reading this Book
This book presents research done by the author exploring how people from Korea, China and Japan think differently that people from the United States, and Europe. While it takes a mostly binary approach to world thought, it does explore differences between different cultures within those two main groups. The idea for the research stemmed from a conversation this professor had in which one of his Chinese students, said “You know, the difference between you and me is that I think the world is a circle and you think it is a line.” This made him question many of the assumptions he had made about the universality of thought.
He explores ideas such as how Americans perceive the world in terms of objects that have fixed and definable characteristics separate from the surrounding environment, while people from Eastern cultures view everything as being interconnected and influenced by everything in the environment. This leads people to make judgements about the causes of things like criminal acts. Americans tend to lay the blame almost exclusively at the feet of the perpetrator while Koreans tend to take the view that the environment, community and particular situation the person found themselves in that particular day, all influenced his/her behavior. This affects attitudes towards punishment and rehabilitation.
It also looks at how language is learned and the affects that has on thinking. Western cultures tend to focus on nouns while Eastern cultures tend to focus on verbs. This is involved with the thinking process in that verbs emphasize the relationships between things while nouns emphasize the characteristics of one particular thing in isolation.
Both ways of thinking have advantages and disadvantages when it comes to things like scientific inquiry or social organization. Thinkers who hail from all points on the spectrum can learn from those who think differently. One of the things I liked about this book is that it emphasizes that within cultures there is an enormous amount of variation and just because an individual is a part of one culture or another does not mean that he/she will adhere to every single tenant that culture emphasizes. It does however point out that we have a lot to learn from each other and we shouldn’t assume that the way we think is the only way to think. Habits of the mind that we take for granted and assume apply to everyone in fact, do not.
How this has changed the way I think about teaching
I just finished reading this book last week so I have yet to apply what I am thinking about in my classes but some of the ideas I would like to apply to my teaching include how to help students with vocabulary acquisition. If students view the world differently and notice things differently, there must be ways that I can use that knowledge to better help them process the knew knowledge they are gaining in my classes.
One of the things that struck me was that students from different cultures infer things differently. I teach TOEFL skills right now so inferring is a big part of what I ask my students to do. According to the author, Eastern cultures have “a distaste for making inferences based on abstract propositions alone.” This means that I probably have to change the way I think about teaching inferring. It will not be as easy for my Japanese students to ignore the fact that they don’t understand a vocabulary word in the TOEFL dialogue because to them, understanding that word is vital to understanding how everything is connected. Because the TOEFL test-makers were American, they are working from a perspective that people will be able to logic their way through things with incomplete information. As a teacher of TOEFL therefor, it is important that I show my students how the test-makers were thinking about this, not just expecting them to know that because it is “common sense” to me. Common sense is cultural.
5. So Good they Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work you Love
by Cal Newport
I found this book lying on our conference table at work. One of the wonderful things about my current job is that we have an office book budget. The only caveat to ordering books is that they should be of interest to more than just you and they must be placed in a public area so everyone can access them after you read them. Several of my coworkers are fans of Cal Newport; I had not heard of him but the title looked interesting.
What you will learn by reading this book
This book is not about teaching but rather about work in general and how to find satisfaction and freedom in your work. It is broken into 4 rules.
The first rule asserts that contrary to popular belief, we should not “follow our passion.” By this he means that we should not look to our jobs to fulfill us and make us happy. Instead we should think about what we can bring to whatever job we have. What skills can we develop that will make us better at what we do. It claims that passion is rare and dangerous so we would be better off becoming really good at something and by becoming really good, we will derive more satisfaction from it. I know for myself, this has been true. I did not start out my career as a teacher with a passion for teaching. It was a means to and end for me and that end was to live internationally. It was not until I started to want to be a better teacher and I started reading books, attending conferences, and taking extra courses, that I began to feel passionate about teaching. I do get an enormous amount of joy from teaching now but only because I am always trying to figure out how to do it better.
The second rule is to “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” This means that by becoming a leader in whatever field you find yourself in is important. “If you want a great job, you need to build up rare and valuable skills to offer in return.” This section of the book, like all of the sections, uses stories of real people to illustrate its points. One of the main ideas is that practicing alone is not enough. Becoming great requires “deliberate practice.” This means practicing in such a way that you study your performance with the purpose of understanding your mistakes and learning from them. If you don’t stop and do this you might become good but you will never become great.
The third rule is “Turn down a promotion or, the importance of control.” In this section of the book he argues that having control over what you do is much more important than having a fancy title. Having control over what you do is the reward for being great at what you do. This can be tricky because once you become valuable people don’t want to let you go but having control over your work is vital to finding satisfaction in it.
The fourth rule is “Think Small, Act Big or, the importance of mission”.
Having a mission to your work gives it meaning and brings satisfaction but finding that mission can be tricky. You can’t set a mission too early, before you have built up your skills because you need to launch projects that will carry out your mission and in order to do that, you need skills. The author suggests that you start small, get concrete feedback and use that feedback to plan your next step.
How this has Changed the Way I Think about Teaching
This book made me realize that I have already built an enormous amount of career capitol over the years I have spent teaching. The skills I have built have made me valuable and I want to continue to build those skills in the future with deliberate practice. It has made me see the importance of always striving to improve my practices, develop new skills that will contribute to my overall teaching skills and enjoy the freedoms that I am working toward.
I hope you enjoy your summer to its fullest with all of its opportunities to recharge your batteries and delve into a topic you want to know more about. What better way to do both of those things simultaneously than by reading. Have you read any of these books? If so, what did you take away from them? What books have changed the way you think about teaching? I am always looking for great things to read so please leave me a comment.
0 Comments