Three Books on Teaching to Check Out

I’ve been devouring some great books on teaching lately. I wanted to shout out three in particular that I’ve found really helpful for thinking about the work we do in the Scholars’ lab.

First is James M. Lang’s Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning. Lang organizes the book around a baseball metaphor called “small ball,” all of those pieces of the game that aren’t flashy but that result in points on the board. We’re not talking home runs. We’re not talking grand slams. We’re talking about bunting and stealing bases. He offers a range of different evidence-based techniques for making small interventions in your teaching that you can implement today. It’s a way of thinking about how you can create meaningful change in the classroom without having to redesign your whole syllabus. Rather than tearing everything down, Lang’s approach suggests you take just a few minutes to make meaningful change. This resonates for me as we do our annual review of the Praxis Program, a well-established curriculum that I’m always looking to improve but not able to redesign from the ground up.

Second, I really enjoyed Catherine J Denial’s, A Pedagogy of Kindness. There’s a lot to admire in Denial’s argument for a more compassionate and inclusive classroom. Denial distinguishes kindness from niceness, which is to say that Denial does not argue for taking all discipline or consequences out of teaching. Rather, she suggests we reframe the classroom to be more collaborative and less adversarial, more fair and less discriminatory. Denial’s work draws heavily on the tradition of Paulo Freire and aims for teaching that empowers learners to shape their own education alongside educators rather than in spite of them.

And then lastly, I want to recommend Bettina L. Love’s We Want to Do More Than Survive, which describes the ways in which K-12 education systems especially fail to create the conditions for Black students to flourish. Especially useful is her term the “educational survival complex,” which describes how educational systems perpetuate deficit approaches to teaching. Marginalized students, especially, are subject to a kind of “spirit murder” that lowers their expectations and shrinks their horizons to mere survival instead of providing transformative learning opportunities.

I did all three of these texts as audiobooks, and they were extremely accessible in that format. The only real problem with that approach was that I found myself clipping and bookmarking constantly because there were so many things I wanted to come back to and cite in the future. I’d suggest these texts for anyone looking to improve their teaching, in ways big or small, no matter the context.