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Head of the Olympiad department of the Uchi.ru educational website and NES graduate Gayane Simonyan shares a selection of books that help people develop, learn and teach others. Gayane herself is currently studying at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
“Not to assume it’s impossible because you find it hard. But to recognize that if it’s humanly possible, you can do it too.”
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Why do you study? Or why do you teach others? How are your goals and training methods related? Without answers to these questions, the value of education – even the most elite, expensive and essential one – decreases.
There is no ultimate goal after reaching which you can stop learning. Today we learn constantly: getting just one diploma is not sufficient any more. The effect of learning depends on the tools we choose, how we motivate ourselves and others, how we evaluate our success and failures. Below is a list of books about education which tell about ways to go beyond a conventional educational system and motivation to continue developing. These are the books about advanced scientific teaching methods and how one can learn while enjoying the process.
John Hattie is considered to be one of the most influential scholars in the field of education. His book is the result of a large-scale research that went on for 15 years engaging more than 86 million students from all over the world. The essence of his idea may seem banal – a teacher should be able to look at learning through the eyes of his or her students. Meanwhile, the teacher also needs to understand how and with which methods he or she influences students, needs to check these methods and modify them based on the collected evidence. Hattie suggested a tool that would help in this work.
He compiled a ranking of factors affecting the achievements and success of students, and developed a transparent and user-friendly teaching model. After writing the book, he continued his research and changed the weight of some factors. You can learn the results on his website, containing a database with research involving more than 300 million students. Hattie has identified more than 320 factors affecting student performance, and generalized them into groups related to students themselves, their family, school, teachers, learning strategies, etc.
Below are some of the qualities that, according to Hattie, teachers should have:
- being passionate about helping students learn;
- having a clear idea of what students will learn;
- building strong relationships with students;
- using science-based learning strategies;
- actively seeking to improve its teaching methods.
Hattie shows that a teacher can have an extremely negative impact on students if, for example, he or she expects poor results from them, uses cliches and divides students into categories depending on their abilities (this is the fixed mindset that Carol Dweck writes about). Rather, teachers must believe that all students can succeed in their learning. One of Hattie’s encouraging findings is that most of the teachers' efforts to improve academic performance are working.
The main idea of this book is that children should be prepared not to take tests, but to live in a world of innovations and opportunities. Unfortunately, this is not what a conventional school is preparing them for. It gives superficial knowledge, makes students learn rather than understand, suppresses students’ skills, not giving them the opportunity to concentrate on their interests.
What do the authors of the book suggest? They suggest learning to develop students' abilities, think critically, ask questions, work with large amounts of information that can be quickly obtained online, as well as work together. Teaching these skills, that are so much in demand in the 21st century, will provide students with the necessary tools to change the world for the better with love for their work.
Speaking about EdTech, Wagner and Dintersmith criticize the unreasonable use of advanced technologies. Things that were taught a century ago were simply transferred to online, but the format of training has not changed. The authors propose, for example, to allow Internet search to be used in school classes, since what is important is not the set of information a student has learned, but whether he or she knows how to use it and can come up with something new based on the old.
In mathematics, Wagner and Dintersmith urge us to focus on statistics and probability theory, because this is much more applicable knowledge than the ability to calculate the discriminant. In learning languages, it is important not to get carried away with theory, but to teach to express thoughts and ideas, to select arguments, to defend your position.
The authors offer two simple questions that can help understand whether the teaching is going in the right direction: "What are you doing in this lesson?" and "Why are you doing this?". In order for teaching to be effective, a student – at school or a university – must know the answers to these questions.
I can also recommend several books that will help develop learning skills.
This is a book about why something learned by rote disappears from memory so quickly and how to avoid it. One of the tips from the authors is that the most successful student is the one who takes on the responsibility.
As the name suggests, this is a book about how and why outstanding investors constantly lose money on investments in education. Jonathan Knee talks about the failures of Rupert Murdoch, John Paulson, Michael Milken and Chris Whittle.
This is a book about how you can change the school system, written by a man who managed to do that. Joel Klein, a lawyer (in the US Department of Justice, he oversaw the famous Microsoft antitrust case), was the Chancellor of the New York City Department of Education for eight years. His reforms caused a flurry of criticism, but the result was stunning.
Former Vice President of Education at Apple John Couch talks about the results that a combination of advanced, science-based methods and modern technologies can bring to education.
