Outstanding. If you are an educator seeking to improve his or her practice, you really need look not much further than this excellent book. There is more of theoretical and practical value in the nine chapters of this book than I have received in nine years of the tedious and intellectually vacant "professional development" sessions my employer, the New York City Department of Education, has proffered. Very highly recommended, again, especially for teachers.

straight and to the point. dispels some of the education "fad" such as Gardiner's Multiple Intelligences.

As a novice teacher, reading this book has been cathartic for me in many ways. It cemented ideas I've gained through my extremely short experience as a teacher, and introduced me to concepts I wasn't familiar with.
Judging from the title alone, I expected the book to center around class management or to address the shortcomings of the educational system. None of that is mentioned in the book. The book chiefly deals with cognitive skills and how to nurture them in learners. In fact, it talks in general about how our mind works. So that makes the book accessible to anyone who's interested in learning more about thinking, memory and the necessity of background knowledge when trying to solve any problem or think critically about a given situation. It doesn't get too technical either.

The author's writing style is simple and he tends to use humour, so that made reading this book very enjoyable to me. ( )

Significance
Through the expertise of a cognitive scientists, this work dispels many of the myths surrounding how we learn (including remembering) and shows practical ways to improve learning. I haven't seen a book quite like it.

Artwork/Writing/Narrative/Organization
* Clear writing with many examples.
* Relevant and clear illustrations.
* Very well organized.
* Easy-going authorial voice organized in a story-like narrative (he practices what he preaches)

Personal Notes
As a parent of an elementary school child, I'm deeply invested in optimizing her learning. In spite of the fact that science is constantly--and rapidly--evolving, this book is a big step towards concrete ways to improve your child's learning--as well as educational systems in general.

Interestingly, the author writes:

"The human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories--so much that psychologists sometimes refer to stories as 'psychologically privileged."

Need I say more? ( )

Very well-done book. Willingham pulls out nine principles that can ensure students learn better, explains and justifies each of them with examples, and makes the entirety extremely actionable. No slow non-fiction here, and all the repetition is for educational purposes -- smart repetitions of themes in sections that are clearly labeled review, rather than the awkward repetition of authors writing over many months forgetting what's already been touched on, or lacking enough of a message to fill a book.

My favorite is Chapter 2, which explains why background knowledge -- just knowing facts -- is prerequisite to critical thinking. In short: if you facts about what's going on already, you can free up your working memory to start to tease out comparisons and deeper analysis. If you're encountering material for the first time, it's biologically almost impossible to retain the facts and also analyze them. Also because we have a limited amount of working memory, knowing things already means you can learn more effectively; this leads to a rich-gets-richer effect in schools, where the best prepared students entering elementary school can learn faster and with less effort, because they already have more background knowledge. I wasn't sure where I stood on the debate of "higher order is what matters" vs. "facts first", but now I'm sold.

Another chapter debunked the idea of multiple intelligences -- my take-away here is that kids don't learn better with differentiated lessons because different kids do better under each approach, but because the students as a whole are less likely to get bored when the material presentation changes repeatedly: it keeps folks interested and on-topic.

Other interesting chapters are on praising effort rather than results, the need for thousands of hours of practice before expert status, and so on, but many of these have gotten enough coverage in the past five years that those chapters weren't as fascinating to me as they might have been if I'd read the book earlier.

Recommended as a well structured, fast read that brings insights. ( )