Education Philosophy

How do we find hope and possibility in challenging times? How do we bring our truest selves into our teaching and personal lives? In this unique, inspiring book, beloved author Regie Routman artfully blends stories and strategies to show how we can introduce more joy and gratitude in our classrooms and in our lives. Regie invites us to focus on what matters most in our work and in our relationships with those we hold dear. She shares ideas and practical takeaways for teaching, learning, and living.

Why America's sons are underachieving, and what we can do about it. Something is happening to boys today. From kindergarten to college, American boys are, on average, less resilient and less ambitious than they were a mere 20 years ago. The gender gap in college attendance and graduation rates has widened dramatically. In Boys Adrift, Dr. Leonard Sax delves into the scientific literature and draws on more than 20 years of clinical experience to explain why boys and young men are failing in school and disengaged at home.

What would it take to transform industrial-era schools into modern organizations capable of supporting deep learning for all? Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine's quest to answer this question took them inside some of America's most innovative schools and classrooms - places where educators are rethinking both what and how students should learn. The story they tell is alternately discouraging and hopeful. Drawing on hundreds of hours of observations and interviews at 30 different schools, Mehta and Fine reveal that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule.

In Who's in My Classroom?, accomplished educator and author delivers an inspirational and practical combination of true stories from teens in Youth Communication's award-winning writing program and the most current educational research. The book links theories of adolescent development and identity formation to best practices in real-world classrooms where teachers strive to form supportive relationships with students.

All social groups have ideals for behavior, even though ethics vary among different cultures and among individuals within each culture. In trying to understand why, Churchland brings together an understanding of the influences of nature and nurture. She looks to evolution to elucidate how, from birth, our brains are configured to form bonds, to cooperate, and to care. Conscience delves into scientific studies, particularly the fascinating work on twins, to deepen our understanding of whether people have a predisposition to embrace specific ethical stands.

Have you heard that language is violence and that science is sexist? Have you read that certain people shouldn't practice yoga? Or been told that being obese is healthy, that there is no such thing as biological sex, or that only White people can be racist? Are you confused by these ideas, and do you wonder how they have managed to challenge the logic of Western society? In this probing volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields.

In this expansion of her 2017 commencement speech at her hometown Langley High, Lauren Graham reflects in her hilarious, relatable voice on growing up, pursuing your dreams, and living in the here and now. "Whatever path you choose, whatever career you decide to go after, the important thing," she writes, "is that you keep finding joy in what you're doing, especially when the joy isn't finding you." She reminds us to be curious and compassionate, no matter where life takes you.

In Running the Room: The Teacher's Guide to Behaviour, Tom Bennett rewrote the book on behaviour management, and outlined the psychology and dynamics underpinning student habits. In this companion, he goes into more detail about how to apply those principles to the classroom.

Paper Belt on Fire is the unlikely account of how two outsiders with no experience in finance—a charter school principal and defrocked philosopher—start a venture capital fund to short the higher education bubble. Against the contempt of the education establishment, they discover, mentor, and back the leading lights in the next generation of dropout innovators and in the end make their investors millions. Can such a madcap strategy help renew American creativity? This story is the behind-the-scenes romp of one team that threw educational authorities into a panic.

The Parkland school shooting was the most avoidable mass murder in American history. And the policies that made it inevitable have spread to your school....

In Not a Day Care, Dr. Everett Piper, president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University and author of the viral essay, "This Is Not a Day Care. It's a University!" takes a hard look at what's happening around the country - including the demand for "safe spaces" and trigger warnings at universities like Yale, Brandeis, and Oberlin - and digs in his heels against the sad and dangerous infantilization of the American spirit.

In The First 20 Hours, Josh Kaufman offers a systematic approach to rapid skill acquisition: how to learn any new skill as quickly as possible. His method shows you how to deconstruct complex skills, maximize productive practice, and remove common learning barriers. By completing just 20 hours of focused, deliberate practice you'll go from knowing absolutely nothing to performing noticeably well. What do you want to learn?

In this classic, the world’s expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association....

Jamie Merisotis, author of the award-winning 2016 book America Needs Talent, argues that people will coexist with smart machines by learning, earning, and serving others over their lifetimes. But Merisotis asserts large-scale change is necessary to develop and hone the knowledge, skills, and abilities that render us uniquely human. These qualities include compassion, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and interpersonal communication.

After the Berlin Wall fell, a group of Christian colleges in the US seized the opportunity to begin strategic faculty and student exchanges with universities inside the Soviet Union. They could not have foreseen the doors that would open next. During a 1990 visit to Russia, John Bernbaum and his colleagues received a surprising invitation from a Russian government official: come help build a faith-based university in Moscow. Thus, after 70 years of fierce religious persecution under communism, the Russian-American Christian University (RACU) was born.

Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car...to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches minimum wage.

Has American higher education become a dinosaur? Why, in short, are problems that should be easy for universities to solve so intractable? The answer, Louis Menand argues, is that the institutional structure and the educational philosophy of higher education have remained the same for 100 years.

How do other countries create "smarter" kids? In a handful of nations, virtually all children are learning to make complex arguments and solve problems they've never seen before. They are learning to think, in other words, and to thrive in the modern economy.What is it like to be a child in the world's new education superpowers? In a global quest to find answers for our own children, author and Time magazine journalist Amanda Ripley follows three Americans embed­ded in these countries for one year.

Intentional Neuroplasticity explores the plasticity of the brain and nervous system, while learning how adversity and trauma impact a student's developing nervous system to affect behaviors—which ultimately changes the way educators approach discipline and engagement.

Here is an unapologetic look into the factors that have caused so many Blacks to think and act in the negative way they do towards themselves and others. This timely body of work is from a man well versed in the American educational system, as well as educational systems throughout the world.