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Sunday, July 22, 2012

On My Two Recommendations for Gregory Michie and Daniel Willingham | The Jose Vilson

On My Two Recommendations for Gregory Michie and Daniel Willingham | The Jose Vilson:


On My Two Recommendations for Gregory Michie and Daniel Willingham

Here’s my first big confession of 2012: I’ve been reading a lot. You’d think, Vilson, that’s not a big deal for you. I’d reply, “As a matter of fact, yes it is.” Huge. Not just my monthly GQ / Wired fix, either (with dabbles of Men’s Health). In the last few months, I’ve read about a book every two weeks on average. More importantly, a couple of them hadn’t even come out to the general public yet …
Until this month. I’m proud to recommend two of the books I’ve read in 2012 that got my mind clicking: Gregory Michie’s We Don’t Need Another Hero: Struggle, Hope, and Possibility in the Age of High-Stakes Schooling and Daniel Willingham’s When Can You Trust The Experts: How to Tell Good Science from Bad in Education. Both of these books are two sides of the same coin I’ve been flipping for the last five months. They’re both sincere efforts at creating solutions their audiences haven’t heard yet, and both speak to the need for further dialogue about the teaching profession in the 21st century.
On Michie’s book, I said:
“Gregory Michie’s experiences in the classroom and his purview post-teaching make this a good