There’s so much to do as a teacher that it can often feel like there is no time left over for reading. But there’s also so much out there for teachers to learn from books to improve their practice. I’m going to list some books on education that I love and tell you why I love them. I think any of these books would be worth your time to read! Hopefully, the ideas I give you from them are useful to you even if you never read the books.

How to Talk So Kids Can Learn by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish
I can’t overstate the impact this book has had on my ability to communicate effectively with students and help them through problems. It’s so common that adults simply don’t know how to help students with their problems. They don’t know the right things to say or how to empathise. This book teaches adults to be empathetic towards the problems of young people. It teaches teachers to allow students to think through their own problems without trying to solve everything for them. The strategies and principles provided in this book are a game-changer and I think every teacher should have to read it.

Creating a Positive Learning Environment by Jenny MacKay
How can you effectively manage your classroom and make it look easy? Read this book (or at least that would be a good start). This book is about planning for success and creating a learning environment that is positive for you and your students. There are so many great ideas in this book. The main message is to proactively manage your class rather than just reacting to things that happen. This book teaches you how to do that. Please read it.

The Writing Revolution – Judith C. Hockman and Natalie Wexler
Writing instruction can be tricky. There are so many different approaches out there but often, by the time students reach year 3 and beyond, they are required to write whole stories. The problem is, that they still struggled with writing great sentences. This book provides a clear method for writing instruction. It involves starting at the sentence level and then building up towards writing paragraphs and then whole texts. I have tried the approach with my students and they have seen great success in producing complex sentences that express complicated logical ideas.

Phonics from A to Z by Wiley Blevins
While not being a revolution or anything like that, this book is a straightforward guide to phonics that gives you everything you need to get going. Everything from tricky terminology to new concepts, where you place your tongue in your mouth to get certain sounds and much more is in here. If you want to get the basics of phonics down, this is for you. As a note, I am Australian and while there are some slight differences between American pronunciations and ours, I didn’t find that it mattered for this book.

Explicit instruction by
This book is a great place to start with learning about explicit instruction. As this approach seems to be gaining popularity, it is probably worth spending time getting familiar with it.

Maintaining Sanity in the Classroom by
This book provides a framework for a democratic classroom where students’ voices are heard and responsibility for the class is taken on by all members. It also provides a valuable framework for understanding the goals that students have that cause them to behave in certain ways. It gives great advice for addressing all kinds of behavioural problems and making your class a nice place to be.

Growth Mindsets by Carol Dweck
This book has been a game-changer for me and the way I teach. The book focuses on how people can change through hard effort. You’ll only put in that effort if you have the right mindset. Many people believe that their potential is fixed, that failure means they are just bad and there is nothing they can do. They have a fixed mindset. A growth mindset says, “I can’t do it yet.” When we think this way, we are realistic about challenges but aim to overcome them with hard work. Mistakes are expected and are all considered learning experiences. If you don’t make any mistakes, you aren’t taking enough risks. Read this book. Change your life (and the lives of your students).

Visible Learning by John Hattie
This book takes research about teaching methods and directly compares the effectiveness of different approaches. Is homework effective? This book claims to have the answer according to research. What is the best way to teach? This book has a lot of ideas about that too. One of the most interesting claims from the book is that everything teachers do is effective, however, some things are more effective than others. We have limited time, so shouldn’t we choose the best?

Writing Matters by William Van Cleve
If you feel ill-equipped to teach grammar, this book will equip you.
This book has so many ideas about how to teach sentence writing. I am a big fan of the approach of starting at the sentence level with writing but it can be difficult to know where to start. This book walks you through the whole thing and it isn’t cheap but it is great. I have scanned in a couple of activities below.

Elephant in the Classroom by Jo Boaler
I have enjoyed using activities from the book called Mindset Mathematics and when I saw this book I was very curious about it. It is an easy-reading overview of mathematics in the classroom. It gives you an overview of what maths is, why we do it, why people are so afraid of it and why they don’t need to be. Especially worth a read if maths isn’t your strongest subject (but still worth it regardless).

Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf
Marcel Proust was an essayist who wrote beautifully and philosophically about the joy of reading. His writings, though complex in terms of grammar, syntax, semantics and concepts can be understood by almost any competent reader. Underlying this ability to comprehend (and to write) is a complicated structure in the brain, formed by significant effort over time with exposure to millions of words. We can understand reading as a seamless and beautiful process or a complicated neurological adaptation and these are two ways of exploring the same phenomenon.
If you are keen to gain a greater understanding of the science of reading, this is a great place to start. It isn’t a practical book for teaching but more of a historical/philosophical/sociological/neurological/psychological look at reading. What is going on in the brain when we read? How did we come to read at all? Humans naturally learn to speak but don’t naturally learn to read. How does the brain change and adapt to reading and what can we learn from those in whom it does not? How can we support those who do not easily learn to read? Additionally, the book discusses the changing landscape of reading in the digital world and what the consequences may be for those who grow up in this changed world.

Tackling Misconceptions in Primary Mathematics by Kieran Mackle
I have read many books on primary school mathematics teaching and this is by far my favourite and the one I would most recommend for others. It takes a great approach that I think other authors in the education field could learn from. It focuses on the misconceptions that teachers and students make in primary school mathematics and addresses them. With so many books I read in education, I find myself saying ‘duh,’ since they start with the obvious introductory matters and get progressively more detailed and complicated. This book starts with what the author thinks you are most likely to get confused about, mess up, teach badly and so on. Doesn’t it make more sense to start there in a way?
Perhaps you will appreciate an example. In the book, he talks about how teachers often say that when you times a number by 10, you put a zero on the end. While this is procedurally correct, it is completely wrong in terms of what is happening in the underlying mathematics and will not lead to an excellent understanding of place value. The reality is, when you multiply by ten, you are shifting all of the digits to the next place towards the left so a 1 in the ones place will become a 10 since the 1 is now in the tens place. The zero indicates that there is nothing in the place to the right. I promise that the explanation in the book is much better…
Conclusion
There are so many more books I could add but that is a start! The information contained in these books is super valuable and worth your time if you can manage it. I’d love to hear what your favourite books are in the comments or you can message me through the contact page.