Teachers Who Became Influential Writers About Learning

A boy who kept telling the class about a broken helicopter gave Paley a problem to think through as a preschool teacher. In The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter, she follows Jason’s recurring story and the class’s attempts to bring him into its play. Read it for a way to listen when a child keeps returning to the same story.

Montessori’s notes from the first Children’s House in Rome became The Montessori Method. Children worked with materials they could handle and repeat, and she watched what happened when they could choose what to do next. The book is worth opening for that change in the teacher’s job. Observation helps decide when to step in.

Freire’s work with adult learners in Brazil helps explain why dialogue comes first in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Chapter Three’s discussion of generative themes asks teachers to build a lesson around situations learners already know and can discuss. Read it for a way to decide what goes into a curriculum together.

In Teaching to Transgress, hooks brings the questions she faced as a college teacher into essays on classroom talk, race, and authority. Try “Language: Teaching New Worlds / New Words” for an account of what a class stands to learn when students can use forms of speech they already know. Pair it with “Engaged Pedagogy,” which puts responsibility for participation on the teacher too.

The School and Society grew out of talks Dewey gave to parents at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School. Follow his discussion of occupations like weaving. A shared practical task gives children something concrete to investigate together, including where a material comes from and who depends on the work.

While teaching Māori children in New Zealand, Ashton-Warner asked for words that mattered to the children and used those words to begin teaching reading. In Teacher she calls this their key vocabulary. Its practical question still has force. Which words would a beginning reader choose to recognize on the page?

Delpit taught in an open elementary classroom in Philadelphia. In the essays collected in Other People’s Children, she considers which students can already infer a school’s expectations and who needs those rules spelled out. “The Silenced Dialogue” is a place to start if you want a clearer way to teach the conventions of school writing while taking students’ own language seriously.

Holt’s years teaching fifth grade supplied the observations in How Children Fail. Start with the section on fear and failure, where he asks what children do when a mistake could embarrass them in front of a teacher or peers. It changes what you might look for when a child guesses or stays quiet.

The Power of Their Ideas draws on Meier’s work in East Harlem public schools. At Central Park East Secondary School, students had to defend work they had done and explain the evidence behind their conclusions. Read Meier to see how a school can make asking for evidence a habit in several subjects and a basis for assessing what students know.

Neill’s book Summerhill describes the school he built around voluntary lessons and community self-government. Read the accounts of school meetings alongside the parts about lessons. Pupils can choose whether to attend a class, and they still live under rules the community makes together.

Korczak describes the children’s court at the Warsaw orphanage in How to Love a Child. The court gave children a place to bring disputes and a part in deciding how to respond. Start there to see how daily rules can teach children to hear another account of what happened.

Tagore’s essay “My School” explains what he wanted children at Santiniketan to gain from learning in the open air. He describes a school where teachers and students share daily life and have time to notice the natural world. Read it for a question about the design of a school that a timetable cannot answer on its own. What does the place itself give children to pay attention to?

Du Bois recalls teaching in rural Tennessee in “Of the Meaning of Progress,” an essay in The Souls of Black Folk. He returns years later and measures what has changed against the lives of his former pupils. It’s a place to start if you want to see what accounts of school improvement can miss when they leave the families out.

Freinet brought a small printing press into his rural French classroom and described the experiment in L’imprimerie à l’école. The children could turn their writing into something another class could read through a school correspondence. It gives an ordinary act of classroom writing a different purpose. The reader becomes someone the writer has to think about.

Kozol taught fourth grade in Boston, and Death at an Early Age records what children encountered in an overcrowded public school. Pay attention to the details he gives about books and buildings and to the adults’ treatment of pupils. The classroom account makes it harder to speak about achievement without asking what the school was actually providing.

The brickmaking chapter of Up from Slavery describes the early years of Tuskegee, when Washington set out to have students help build the buildings they would use. He recounts failed kilns and objections to required manual work. Read the chapter for the argument underneath the project and the disagreement it prompted about what a school should teach.

Kaufman put her years in New York City public schools to work in Up the Down Staircase. The novel lets you read a teacher’s day through the memos, notes, and letters that crowd it. Notice the difference between an administrator’s memo about discipline and the way a student speaks in an assignment or a note.