Here are 100 books that Skim, Dive, Surface fans have personally recommended if you like
Skim, Dive, Surface.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I love to teach and to do research on teaching and learning. Little compares to seeing how students’ faces light up when they get it. I want more students to experience the experience of getting it. After teaching for 25 years, and taking a deep dive into the scientific literature on learning, I have accumulated some important insights that I share in my work as Executive Director of a teaching and learning center, with my students, and with faculty across the nation. Teaching is not an impromptu act. It is an art and a science and I revel in it. These books will light a fire in you.
Sure the brain is at the heart of all we do but how do we bridge the chasm between technical neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and what we do day to day in the classroom?
The book was packed with aha moments connecting specific practices such as why it is important to pause often in class to the science (it helps move information from working memory to long-term memory). With vivid examples, the authors make neuroscience palatable and pragmatic.
Top 10 Pick for Learning Ladders’ Best Books for Educators Summer 2021
A groundbreaking guide to improve teaching based on the latest research in neuroscience, from the bestselling author of A Mind for Numbers.
Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have made enormous strides in understanding the brain and how we learn, but little of that insight has filtered down to the way teachers teach. Uncommon Sense Teaching applies this research to the classroom for teachers, parents, and anyone interested in improving education. Topics include:
• keeping students motivated and engaged, especially with online learning • helping students remember information long-term, so…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I love to teach and to do research on teaching and learning. Little compares to seeing how students’ faces light up when they get it. I want more students to experience the experience of getting it. After teaching for 25 years, and taking a deep dive into the scientific literature on learning, I have accumulated some important insights that I share in my work as Executive Director of a teaching and learning center, with my students, and with faculty across the nation. Teaching is not an impromptu act. It is an art and a science and I revel in it. These books will light a fire in you.
I love books with specific, pragmatic ways to change what I do in the classroom.
Every chapter of this book was packed with something I wanted to try. There are a lot of general suggestions floating around (e.g., more active learning), but what exactly does a teacher do?
This book is a great compliment to my book. The former gives students pragmatic tips, and this one is packed with examples for teachers.
Unleash powerful teaching and the science of learning in your classroom
Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning empowers educators to harness rigorous research on how students learn and unleash it in their classrooms. In this book, cognitive scientist Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D., and veteran K-12 teacher Patrice M. Bain, Ed.S., decipher cognitive science research and illustrate ways to successfully apply the science of learning in classrooms settings. This practical resource is filled with evidence-based strategies that are easily implemented in less than a minute-without additional prepping, grading, or funding!
Research demonstrates that these powerful strategies raise student achievement by…
I love to teach and to do research on teaching and learning. Little compares to seeing how students’ faces light up when they get it. I want more students to experience the experience of getting it. After teaching for 25 years, and taking a deep dive into the scientific literature on learning, I have accumulated some important insights that I share in my work as Executive Director of a teaching and learning center, with my students, and with faculty across the nation. Teaching is not an impromptu act. It is an art and a science and I revel in it. These books will light a fire in you.
I am a nerd that loves evidence. Teachers often share the wisdom of experience but that only goes so far.
This book hits all the big-ticket items teachers struggle with. Class participation, assessment, getting students to talk, active engagement, and course design. It also covers how to give students more control.
I liked how this book made me question some long-held beliefs. I first disagreed and then was won over by the evidence and examples. That’s a treat.
Professors know a lot, but they are rarely taught how to teach. The author of the Chronicle of Higher Education's popular "Pedagogy Unbound" column explains everything you need to know to be a successful college instructor.
College is changing, but the way we train academics is not. Most professors are still trained to be researchers first and teachers a distant second, even as scholars are increasingly expected to excel in the classroom.
There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I love to teach and to do research on teaching and learning. Little compares to seeing how students’ faces light up when they get it. I want more students to experience the experience of getting it. After teaching for 25 years, and taking a deep dive into the scientific literature on learning, I have accumulated some important insights that I share in my work as Executive Director of a teaching and learning center, with my students, and with faculty across the nation. Teaching is not an impromptu act. It is an art and a science and I revel in it. These books will light a fire in you.
Excited, happy students, will learn better. Too often teachers focus on content coverage and neglect the affective environment learning take place in.
Dr. Cavanaugh is a skilled writer who weaves research and pragmatics into seamless stories to help us do better. I found myself marveling at how much was packed in here and how well she pulled back the curtain on an important element of learning – emotion.
Historically we have constructed our classrooms with the assumption that learning is a dry, staid affair best conducted in quiet tones and ruled by an unemotional consideration of the facts. The field of education, however, is beginning to awaken to the potential power of emotions to fuel learning, informed by contributions from psychology and neuroscience. In friendly, readable prose, Sarah Rose Cavanagh argues that if you as an educator want to capture your students' attention, harness their working memory, bolster their long-term retention, and enhance their motivation, you should consider the emotional impact of your teaching style and course design.…
I’ve researched children’s digital lives since the internet first arrived in many people’s homes. Recently, I noticed parents’ concerns weren’t listened to – mostly, researchers interview parents to find out about their children rather than about parents themselves. Worse, policymakers often make decisions that affect parents without consulting them. So, in Parenting for a Digital Future we focused on parents, following my previous books on Children and the Internet and The Class: Living and Learning in the Digital Age. As a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, I love that moment of knocking on a family’s door, and am always curious to see what I will find!
As a researcher, I’m always looking out for fresh ways to approach familiar problems.
Three problems really bother me. One is the idea of reducing all the different types of media, and all the different ways families use media, to a simplistic formula – screen time. As if we could just measure screen time, reduce it by turning parents into screen time police, and thereby solve the problems of our digital age.
Another is the idea of seeing parents as having all the power and children as willful or ignorant or naughty and so needing to be controlled. As if families weren’t trying to be more democratic and as if parents had nothing to learn from their children. The third is the idea that families have got to work all this out on their own, as if digital innovators and the wider society weren’t in some ways part of the…
Children and Families in the Digital Age offers a fresh, nuanced, and empirically-based perspective on how families are using digital media to enhance learning, routines, and relationships. This powerful edited collection contributes to a growing body of work suggesting the importance of understanding how the consequences of digital media use are shaped by family culture, values, practices, and the larger social and economic contexts of families' lives. Chapters offer case studies, real-life examples, and analyses of large-scale national survey data, and provide insights into previously unexplored topics such as the role of siblings in shaping the home media ecology.
I am an integrative child psychiatrist with a special focus on how screen-time detunes the nervous system, causing issues with sleep, mood, focus, and behavior. In fact, technology use is the most underestimated influence of our time; it causes problems whose connections aren’t always obvious, leads to misdiagnosis and overmedication, and wastes resources. I am passionate about helping children and families methodically reverse these changes using screen fast protocols that provide dramatic improvements in functioning and well-being. I speak regularly to parents’ groups, schools, and health providers, and my work has been featured on such outlets as NPR, CNN, NBC Nightly News, Psychology Today, and Good Morning America.
I found myself wanting to stand up and applaud while reading this book. The description of what a kid really does on a typical day at school is alone worth the purchase (and will make you laugh... and then heave a deep sigh.) But more importantly, these two teachers outline the pitfalls our digitally-driven world has created in terms of education, deep thinking, social responsibility, and ability to problem solve. As someone who has done a lot of research into the “screens in school” topic, I found this book to be thorough and clear, and written with enough humor to make a tough topic palatable.
Over the past decade, educational instruction has become increasingly digitized as districts rush to dole out laptops and iPads to every student. Yet the most important question, “Is this what is best for students?” is glossed over. Veteran teachers Joe Clement and Matt Miles have seen firsthand how damaging technology overuse and misuse has been to our kids. On a mission to educate and empower parents, they show how screen saturation at home and school has created a wide range of cognitive and social deficits in our young people. They lift the veil on what’s really going on in schools:…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I’m a lifelong typewriter lover. That passion has taken me down some deep and wonderful rabbit holes, including critiques of digital tech. I’m just as hooked on tech as the average person today, and of course, it has real benefits, but I’m painfully aware of how my addiction damages my attention, privacy, and self-reliance. The books I’ve picked help me articulate the problems, imagine just how bad things can get, and see alternatives. In my day job as a philosophy professor, I think about topics like memory, time, and technology, and specialize in controversial thinker Martin Heidegger (I own his typewriter!).
Birkerts’ essays make me beautifully sad and newly defiant. Like me, he’s an analog native living in a digital world who has felt his ability to concentrate on the written word erode over the years.
But boy, can he write: “Imagination, the one feature that connects us with the deeper sources and possibilities of being, thins out every time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another thin layer of sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence, making it just that much harder for us to grasp ourselves as part of an ancient continuum.” To the typewriter, I go!
Trenchant, expansive essays on the cultural consequences of ongoing, all-permeating technological innovation
In 1994, Sven Birkerts published The Gutenberg Elegies, his celebrated rallying cry to resist the oncoming digital advances, especially those that might affect the way we read literature and experience art―the very cultural activities that make us human. After two decades of rampant change, Birkerts has allowed a degree of everyday digital technology into his life. He refuses to use a smartphone, but communicates via e-mail and spends some time reading online. In Changing the Subject, he examines the changes that he observes in himself and others―the distraction…
I've been teaching and writing in the field of the history of technology for over six decades, and it's not too much to say that the field and my professional career grew up together. The Society for the History of Technology began in 1958, and its journal, Technology and Culture, first appeared the following year. I've watched, and helped encourage, a broadening of the subject from a rather internal concentration on machines and engineering to a widening interest in technology as a social activity with cultural and political, as well as economic, outcomes. In my classes I always assigned not only original documents and scholarly monographs but also memoirs, literature, and films.
It is hardly news that housework is gendered. But in this classic study Cowan, by taking housewifery seriously as work and kitchen utensils and appliances seriously as technologies, opens up the whole panorama of production and consumption in a domestic setting. The influx of new appliances, and in a more convenient form old materials (such as powdered soap) in the early decades of the 20th century worked to, in a sense, “industrialize” the home. Unlike factory workers, however, housewives were unpaid, isolated, and unspecialized. Their managerial role shrank (hired help disappeared from most homes) and rather than being drained of meaning, like the work of factory hands, theirs became burdened with portentous implications of love, devotion, and creativity. Finally, as housework became “easy,” standards rose. At one time changing the bed might have amounted to putting the bottom sheet in the wash and the top sheet on the bottom,…
In this classic work of women's history (winner of the 1984 Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology), Ruth Schwartz Cowan shows how and why modern women devote as much time to housework as did their colonial sisters. In lively and provocative prose, Cowan explains how the modern conveniences,washing machines, white flour, vacuums, commercial cotton,seemed at first to offer working-class women middle-class standards of comfort. Over time, however, it became clear that these gadgets and gizmos mainly replaced work previously conducted by men, children, and servants. Instead of living lives of leisure, middle-class women found themselves struggling…
I’ve been fascinated by the power of technology to make the world a better place since I read Robert A. Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo at the age of six. I was born in 1969, the year of the first crewed moon landing and the first connection on ARPANET, the network that started the internet. Space, technology, and the future have always been central to my career as a writer. I began investigating DARPA while writing a book on commercial spaceflight, was amazed by the breadth of technologies the agency helped launch and made it the topic of my next book.
Somewhere between wide-eyed optimism about the potential of human ingenuity and skepticism about technology’s ability to save us from ourselves lies Annie Jacobsen’s book. It covers DARPA’s founding and the first fifty years before reporting on projects active at the time of the book’s writing (it came out in 2015).
The result is a balanced mix of history, analysis, and you-are-there reporting in a highly readable narrative. The book contains the best explanation I’ve seen of DARPA’s controversial, post-911 Total Information Awareness program and raises important questions about when, how, and why governments should conduct research and development in secret.
No one has ever written the history of the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful and most controversial military science R&D agency. In the first-ever history of the organization, New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobsen draws on inside sources, exclusive interviews, private documents and declassified memos to paint a picture of DARPA, or "the Pentagon's brain," from its Cold War inception in 1958 to the present.
This is the book on DARPA - a compelling narrative about this clandestine intersection of science and the American military and the often frightening results.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Since I was a little boy, I’ve been passionate about technology and its potential to help people. After 25 years working in high tech, digital transformation, and artificial intelligence with a career spanning Intel, Google DeepMind, and a few successful startups I co-founded, I’ve pivoted to helping people, particularly leaders, understand how AI will transform business, education, and society, and how they can use AI to create new value and solve problems for people. AI is about to change everything about everything, and these books will help readers understand what’s coming and prepare themselves for humanity’s journey into an age of abundant intelligence.
When Peter’s book was released the same month as mine, I was initially concerned it would be duplicative. As I eagerly read his book, I realized it was a companion piece to mine. We discuss many of the same topics, and examples in my book help to illustrate concepts in his and vice versa.
From the New York Times bestselling authors of Abundance and Bold comes a practical playbook for technological convergence in our modern era.
In their book Abundance, bestselling authors and futurists Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler tackled grand global challenges, such as poverty, hunger, and energy. Then, in Bold, they chronicled the use of exponential technologies that allowed the emergence of powerful new entrepreneurs. Now the bestselling authors are back with The Future Is Faster Than You Think, a blueprint for how our world will change in response to the next ten years of rapid technological disruption.
