Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning

This is a good and practical book about teaching. It’s meant for school teachers, but I read it for tips on communicating ideas.

The title refers to the scope of teaching – there are large-scale strategies to improving teaching across groups. But this book is about small teacher – how to improve individual students.

There’s some good stuff here:

• Basic retrieval of ideas
• Connecting ideas to other ideas, to avoid disconnected islands of knowledge
• Explaining the ideas to others to increase your own understanding

Each chapter discusses the importance and theory of the idea, then has specific strategies at the end.

There’s a section at the end of motivation that I skimmed because my “students” are quite different than the average pupil, so not a lot of it applied.

This is a book I’ll skim through again the next time I’m putting together a workshop or my college courses.