Recommended Reading
BOOKS
BOOKS
This book is about disobedience. Positive disobedience. Disobedience as a kind of professional behaviour. It shows how teachers can survive and even influence an education system that does staggering damage to potential.
More importantly it is an arm around the shoulder of disobedient teachers who transform people’s lives, not by climbing promotion ladders but by operating at the grassroots.
Disobedient Teaching tells stories from the chalk face. Some are funny and some are heartbreaking, but they all happen in New Zealand schools.
This book says you can reform things in a system that has become obsessed with assessment and tick-box reporting. It shows how the essence of what makes a great teacher is the ability to change educational practices that have been shaped by anxiety, ritual and convention.
Disobedient Teaching argues the transformative power of teachers who think and act.
A book about what is important to learn in the future.
This book concerns only what’s worth learning before professional specialization.
It mainly has to do with the first dozen years or so of education.
What’s worth learning is a fundamental problem for education today,
Likely to matter in the lives that learners are likely to live.
“These ideas are fundamental to our understanding of the world; they figure centrally in science, history, mathematics, literature.”
However, what if many of these ideas, central though they might be to particular disciplines or professions, hardly ever come up in significant ways in the lives that most learners are likely to live? Are they truly worth learning?
Maybe they are worth learning in some intrinsic sense, that is, good to know in principle. But that answer works only if they stay known.
The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives—personal, artistic, civic, something else.
What’s worth learning?
Beyond basic skills—twenty-first-century skills and dispositions
Beyond the traditional disciplines—renewed, hybrid, and less familiar disciplines.
Beyond discrete disciplines—interdisciplinary topics and problems
Beyond regional perspectives—global perspectives, problems, and studies
Beyond mastering content—learning to think about the world with the content.
Beyond prescribed content—much more choice of what to learn