Books

Written by Rebecca Hare, one of the Design Consultants for the Superintendent Innovation Fellowship, this book provides a overview of design concepts and how they are tied to learning. Focus is on how to integrate the design principles into your classroom, with student engagement and long-term deeper learning outcomes.

Created by an international team of architects and designers concerned about our failing education system, The Third Teacher explores the critical link between the school environment and how children learn, and offers 79 practical design ideas, both great and small, to guide reader's efforts to improve our schools.

A great book that explains the the historic design of schools and ways to shift this design to support more learning styles. Focus on the whole school but chapters can be read independently for specific content.

Culturally responsive pedagogy has shown great promise, but many educators still struggle with its implementation. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.

Drawing on her life's work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.

To dismantle the educational survival complex and to achieve educational freedom--not merely reform--teachers, parents, and community leaders must approach education with the imagination, determination, boldness, and urgency of an abolitionist. Following in the tradition of activists like Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin, and Fannie Lou Hamer, We Want to Do More Than Survive introduces an alternative to traditional modes of educational reform and expands our ideas of civic engagement and intersectional justice.

Intro and Environment chapters give a terrific overview of ways to shift practice to ensure the culture of the classroom is supporting student's as thinkers and learners.

Based on the work at the Stanford University d.school and its Environments Collaborative Initiative, Make Space is a tool that shows how space can be intentionally manipulated to ignite creativity.

Written in the 70's this book was influential in shaping architecture, building and planning to reconnect with how we create spaces that feel "alive" that are imbued with the patterns and life of the activities that house.

More of a philosophical text but a wonderful overview on the larger principles of design and how design is most often trusting our instincts in our observations of the patterns that shape our spaces.

Click here to read the detailed table of contents.

Public Interest Design Education Guidebook: Curricula, Strategies, and SEED Academic Case Studies presents the pedagogical framework and collective curriculum necessary to teach public interest designers.

Do these new generation learning environments actually work – and if so, in what ways? Are they leading to the sorts of improved experiences and learning outcomes for students they promise? This book describes strategies for assessing what is actually working.

*Available to read for free online.

Learning Spaces focuses on how learner expectations influence such spaces, the principles and activities that facilitate learning, and the role of technology from the perspective of those who create learning environments: faculty, learning technologists, librarians, and administrators.

Designs for Living and Learning has been a favorite resource among educators and caregivers for more than a decade, and this new edition is packed with even more ideas that can be used as you create captivating environments that nurture children, families, and staff while supporting children's learning.