Reddit reviews How to Survive in Your Native Land (Innovators in Education)

Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

The opening essay of this short read is a condemnation of traditional schooling techniques---and it's also the speech he delivered when he (again) won the NY Teacher of the Year award. Gatto gets at the heart of why public schools consistently produce pencil pushers, not leaders. Every teacher should read this book.

How to Survive in Your Native Land by James Herndon

If Dumbing Us Down is the manifesto in favor of a more liberal pedagogy, Herdon's book is a memoir of someone trying to put that pedagogy in action. It's also a simple, beautiful easy to read book, the kind that is so good it reminds us just how good a book can be. I've read the teaching memoir that made Jonahton Kozol famous, this one is better.

The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori

In the early 1900s, Maria Montessori taught literacy to children that society had otherwise assumed were unreachable. She did this by using the scientific method to study each child's learning style. Some of what she introduced has been widely incorporated (like child-sized furniture) and some of it seems great but unworkable in overcrowded schools. The bottom line is that the Montessori method was one of the first pedagogical techniques that was backed by real results: both in test scores and in growing kids that thrive on learning and participation.

"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?": A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity by Beverly Daniel Tatum

While not precisely a book on how to teach, this book is incredibly helpful to any teacher working with a diverse student population, or one where the race they are teaching differs from their own. It explains the process that white, black, and children of other races go through in identifying themselves as part of a particular race. In the US, race is possibly the most taboo subject, so it is rare to find a book this honest and straightforward on a subject most educators try not to talk about at all. I highly recommend this book.

If there is any chance you will be teaching history, definitely read:

Lies My Teacher Told Me and A People's History of the United States (the latter book is a classic and, personally, changed my life).

Also recommend: The Multi-player Classroom by Lee Sheldon and Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov

Finally, anyone who plans to teach math should read this essay, "Lockhart's Lament" [PDF at the bottom of the page].

PS, I was tempted to use Amazon affiliate links, but my conscious wouldn't let me.