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2024 Books

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I didn't read a huge amount of books last year but I felt the quality was very high overall, with decent variety, too. Here's hoping 2025 is even better. The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading  by Christopher Such This was fantastically useful and also rather disappointing. Useful because it is a great review of current research on teaching methods for reading, complete with suggestions for structuring lessons. Terrifying because I came across some critical elements of reading instruction that I haven't been covering sufficiently - for years. "Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies." This book should really help improve my teaching practice and I expect to have more to say about Such's work going forward. He has a follow-up coming out this year. Learning in Depth  by Kieran Egan I enrolled in a 6-week intensive Learning in Depth summer course. Now I am mentoring a 30-week version and I have launched an experimental progra...
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Cramming 12 years of learning into 6 mad, wonderful weeks: My experience in the Learning in Depth summer cohort.

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This summer I joined a Learning in Depth program run by Brandon Hendrickson of  The Lost Tools of Learning  blog and  Science is Weird  and Alessandro Gelmi, an Egan-education scholar and PhD candidate at the University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy. Learning in Depth (LiD) is the brainchild of Kieran Egan, a program in which students are randomly assigned a topic in early primary school. Students then study and develop a portfolio on this topic for up to the next 12 years. It was almost a year exactly after I read an Astral Codex Ten  book review  of Kieran Egan’s  The Educated Mind  and began down the rabbit hole that led me to this summer cohort. I had read a few of Egan’s books and many of Brandon’s blog posts and tried out some techniques,  but the LiD summer cohort would be my first chance to really engage with Imaginative Education firsthand. To make matters a little more complicated, I would be doing the cohort while traveling with from H...
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