The New Science of Teaching and Learning: Using the Best of Mind, Brain, and Education Science in the Classroom Review

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The New Science of Teaching and Learning: Using the Best of Mind, Brain, and Education Science in the Classroom ReviewTracey Tokuhama-Espinosa has given us a popularized version of the research and new learning we have regarding neuroscience, learning theory, and cognitive psychology. There is little new here except for the admonition that we should be careful in our assumptions. However, I believe she makes some big leaps of application in some of her recommendations for teachers and applications of the research. Most of her recommendations apply to using the new understandings and ideas in the traditional, behavioral conditioned classroom. I believe it is time for us to stop reinforcing this model of teaching and learning, and using the new research and understanding about how people learn, design classrooms, and teaching strategies that are compatible.
The most strident example of this "boxed" thinking comes in her defense of homework! That question has been tried and found wanting, but Ms. Tokuhama-Espinosa still clings to the practice, and tries to justify it with the new research. This is an injustice to the research and to the teaching profession.The New Science of Teaching and Learning: Using the Best of Mind, Brain, and Education Science in the Classroom OverviewThis book offers a definitive, scientifically grounded guide for better teaching and learning practices. Drawing from thousands of documents and the opinions of recognized experts worldwide, it explains in straight talk the new Mind, Brain, and Education Science, a field that has grown out of the intersection of neuroscience, education, and psychology. While parents and teachers are often bombarded with promises of a better brain, this book distinguishes true, applicable neuroscience from the popular neuromyths that have gained currency in education. Each instructional guideline presented in the book is accompanied by real-life classroom examples to help teachers envision the direct application of the information in their own schools. The author offers essential tools for evaluating new information as it flows from research and adds to what we know. Written by a teacher for teachers, this easy-to-use resource documents the findings of the top experts in the field of neuroscience, psychology, and education. It addresses the confusion around the misuse of concepts in brain-based education, and applies well-substantiated findings about the brain to classroom practice and teaching."This seminal book has the potential to change the way we think about teaching and learning." -From the Foreword by Pat Wolfe, educational consultant, Mind Matters, Inc."This is not only an excellent guide for teachers and a most-needed review of the cutting edge research on neuroeducation, but also a model of pedagogy. The author guides readers step by step in the fascinating exploration of the new transdisciplinary field called MBE, Mind, Brain and Education Science. I recommend this book to every teacher. It will clarify many issues and promote many educational initiatives." -Antonio M. Battro, M.D., President of IMBES, International Mind, Brain and Education Society"Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa has written a highly accessible, extraordinarily well-documented compilation of essential information for all educators. This breakthrough book guides informed decision-making using the best science has to offer to return joy and authentic learning to our classrooms." -Judy Willis, M.D., M.Ed., neurologist, middle-school teacher, author, and renowned speaker on brain-based education "A fascinating review of state-of-the-art research. It does more than just debunk myths, it also points toward tried and true tenets and principles of education. Written with clarity, freshness, and a sense of urgency, this is a book that every educator-and everyone who cares about children-should read." -Craig Pohlman, author of How Can My Kid Succeed in School and Revealing Minds

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Transforming Literacy: Changing Lives Through Reading and Writing (Innovation and Leadership in English Language Teaching) Review

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Transforming Literacy: Changing Lives Through Reading and Writing (Innovation and Leadership in English Language Teaching) ReviewThis book goes deep, discussing how important language and narrative are, and how much the 21st century classroom needs that sense of language and narrative to create the most important learning experiences. For Waxler and Hall, working in a long line of tradition and innovation, human beings want to learn, and they want to know themselves. Literature is the best path to that possibility.
Transforming Literacy: Changing Lives Through Reading and Writing (Innovation and Leadership in English Language Teaching) OverviewThis book is interdisciplinary in focus and centers on enlarging teachers' understanding of how reading and writing can change lives and how the language arts can contribute significantly to and change educational processes in the twenty-first century. Implicit in its argument is that although the emphasis on science and math is crucial to education in the digital edge, it remains vitally important to keep reading and writing, language and story, at the heart of the educational process. This is particularly true in a democratic society because shaping stories through human language can enhance the quality of our lives, and teach us something important about what it means to be human and vulnerable. In this sense, stories allow for self-reflection and an increased opportunity to enhance and understand emotional intelligence and human community.

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What Do I Say: The Therapist's Guide to Answering Client Questions Review

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What Do I Say: The Therapist's Guide to Answering Client Questions ReviewThis book really is fantastic. I picked it up at a store the other day and just had to have it!! It tackles the questions clients ask a therapist all throughout their therapy with you, from the initial phone call and on. The author teaches us what's behind these questions and gives clear, professional, yet warm responses that always put the client first without compromising boundaries or the therapist's personality. I'm very, very impressed and I am thrilled that a book like this is finally on the market. There is another book out there called "What Therapists Say and Why" that's about 95% useless, but "What Do I Say?" is really worth it!!What Do I Say: The Therapist's Guide to Answering Client Questions Overview
The must-have guide to honestly and sensitively answering your clients' questions
Written to help therapists view their clients' questions as collaborative elements of clinical work, What Do I Say? explores the questions-some direct, others unspoken-that all therapists, at one time or another, will encounter from clients. Authors and practicing therapists Linda Edelstein and Charles Waehler take a thought-provoking look at how answers to clients' questions shape a therapeutic climate of expression that encourages personal discovery and growth.
Strategically arranged in a question-and-answer format for ease of use, this hands-on guide is conversational in tone and filled with personal examples from experienced therapists on twenty-three hot-button topics, including religion, sex, money, and boundaries. What Do I Say? tackles actual client questions, such as:

Can you help me? (Chapter 1, The Early Sessions)

Sorry I am late. Can we have extra time? (Chapter 9, Boundaries)

I don't believe in all this therapy crap. What do you think about that? (Chapter 3, Therapeutic Process)

Why is change so hard? (Chapter 4, Expectations About Change)

Will you attend my graduation/wedding/musical performance/speech/business grand opening? (Chapter 20, Out of the Office)

Where are you going on vacation? (Chapter 10, Personal Questions)

I gave your name to a friend . . . Will you see her? (Chapter 9, Boundaries)

Should I pray about my problems? (Chapter 12, Religion and Spirituality)

Are you like all those other liberals who believe gay people have equal rights? (Chapter 13, Prejudice)

The power of therapy lies in the freedom it offers clients to discuss anything and everything. It's not surprising then, that clients will surprise therapists with their experiences and sometimes with the questions they ask. What Do I Say? reveals how these questions-no matter how difficult or uncomfortable-can be used to support the therapeutic process rather than derail the therapist–client relationship.

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Mixing Minds: The Power of Relationship in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism Review

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Mixing Minds: The Power of Relationship in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism ReviewSince her unconventional childhood meditating and studying Buddhism, Pilar Jennings brings her professional expertise and personal experience into this rewarding, if challenging, study. Both analyst and analysand, her background in both insight (vipassana) and Tibetan approaches to Buddhism enriches her clinical case studies and psychiatric applications. The result opens up methods where dialogue--and confrontation with the self amidst others in the journey towards psychic healing and spiritual integration--presents advocates of these traditions with possibilities of how they may co-exist more harmoniously. In Buddhism and psychiatry, interpersonal relationships matter most for her.
She begins with her own story. Dr. Jennings emphasizes that no mature understanding of psychoanalysis or Buddhism can rely on facile summaries. Her study, grounded in theory but alighting on her everyday life, delves into both approaches. Here a student and teacher, patient and doctor, come together to help the injured recover a sense of wholeness. She favors emptiness, a fundamental dharma concept, as essential. She suggests that counselors open themselves and their clients up to a more playful, open-ended evolution of their psychic encounters into the "pregnant void" where the fluid Buddhist model, of no-self and impermanence, allows more freedom for both the expert provider and the searching supplicant.
Coming to terms with a self which learns not to trust in fixed goals or settled moods may help fragmented Westerners, whether or not Buddhist practitioners, to understand as lived behavior these arcane concepts of "no-self" and "emptiness." About emptiness, she observes "that all phenomena, including healing systems, are empty of inherent meaning and are rather a constant flux of changing causes, circumstances, and conditions. What Buddhism and psychoanalysis are and can provide will mix with the setting, the consciousness, and the unconscious of the practitioner." Her wisdom, as a professional and as a student, a Buddhist and a clinician, appears hard-won, and sometimes easily lost. That is, Dr. Jennings wrestles with the material she teaches here. Fixed answers and pat theories elude her grasp.
Many of her Western Buddhist peers, she cautions, run too rapidly away from psychological healing into spiritual techniques, while these seekers may fail to appreciate the damage they may do when they misinterpret what "no-self" and "emptiness" may truly mean. Jennings skillfully navigates between these Buddhist teachings and psychological inheritances. She sums up basic dharma well, and she contrasts and compares its instructions with Freudian-influenced schools of psychiatry deftly.
However, she refers to Jungian insights into the numinous more in passing; she offers enough to spark curiosity, but then skips away from the resonances that remain. She intervenes, imposes Cartesian limits upon such psychic suppositions as Jung entertained, and she veers off sharply for a hundred pages before mentioning his more open-ended suggestions again. Appearing to favor Freudian-derived responses, Jennings reveals her own preferences, but the appeal of Jung for many Westerners also pursuing Buddhism leaves this fruitful topic underexamined. The relationship of Buddhist-inspired applications to Western analysands from a New Age or Eastern-tinged background, as well as Asians growing up in the global diaspora's modern mindsets, signals a realm for inquiry that Jennings' pioneering work may direct future researchers to investigate.
Spiritual freedom, she muses, may mask unresolved anxieties that the practitioner has fled or masked within the unconscious. The power of the unexamined mental constructs within us, Jennings warns, may be worsened if anger persists but is glossed over or sidestepped. Instead, she suggests, the Buddhist parallel of taking on anger to break it apart--rather than averting one's gaze from it and its effects and its objects--may be the only way to gain a difficult, perhaps endlessly delayed, wholeness that comes from not so much ending anger as coming to terms with its psychic energy and practical impacts.
For desire, as with suffering and with anger, she compares Buddhist responses with those studied by her colleagues. The gap between what one wishes to gain and the mundane knowledge that nothing gained lasts forever represents real life. Dependent origin, the cause-and-effect relationship at the heart of dharma, connects with the student learning from the lama: a model of interdependence rather than self-reliance (taught to Westerners as their assertive, secular ideal ever since the Enlightenment) becomes for Jennings the aspiration better fitted to humbler, spiritually yearning, and psychologically broken people today.
Therefore, Dr. Jennings offers analysts a space where limits of any model can be acknowledged. Rather than grasping one theory, one outcome, one regimen, she urges the pair to shed mental delusions that enlightenment or wholeness precludes a continuation of the psychic struggle. No blissful end of days awaits, for her mind. Jennings cannot accept this entry into detached contentment as a viable, probable, or practical resolution.
By studying the causes of suffering, suffering can be understood. It cannot be escaped or overcome. Instead, how one reacts to suffering proves the solution. Shedding delusion means to grow up and realize that enlightenment may be, for Westerners accustomed to salvific journeys, the only happy ending, and one less free of care than one may expect. For Pilar Jennings, the Buddhist perspective, sharpened over thousands of years, intersects a century of psychological theories and clinical trials and case studies. For the informed analyst, who may increasingly be cognizant of Buddhism among his or her Western patients, and who may even practice it, the augmentation of dharma with analysis serves as a harbinger of the meeting of true minds, as these venerable energies mix and blend.Mixing Minds: The Power of Relationship in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism OverviewMixing Minds explores the interpersonal relationships between psychoanalysts and their patients, and Buddhist teachers and their students. Through the author's own personal journey in both traditions, she sheds light on how these contrasting approaches to wellness affect our most intimate relationships. These dynamic relationships provide us with keen insight into the emotional ups and downs of our lives - from fear and anxiety to love, compassion, and equanimity. Mixing Minds delves into the most intimate of relationships and shows us how these relationships are the key to the realization of our true selves.

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Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything Review

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Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything ReviewEven educators with well established mindfulness practices can find it a challenge to maintain mindfulness at work. What might mindful teaching look like? What can one do to support it? Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything by Deborah Schoeberlein (Wisdom Publications, available in early September) answers these questions. It's an important new resource for all teachers, regardless of their previous experience with mindfulness practice. In her book, Schoeberlein paints a detailed picture of a day in the life of a mindful teacher. The day begins with waking up to mindful breathing and setting an intention. It ends that night with meditating on one's satisfaction with the day. In between, there are many informal practices, described by Schoeberlein, which teachers can use throughout the school day, on their own or in their interactions with students. These descriptions aren't a prescription for mindful teaching. Rather, they provide examples that can inspire teachers to find ways to infuse their days with mindfulness that work for them.
Teaching mindfully is already a great gift to students. It's where many teachers might stop, not feeling that teaching mindfulness practices to their students is possible in their situation. However, mindful teaching changes classroom environments, creating new opportunities. Further, Schoeberlein's many examples of ways to teach mindfulness can suggest possibilities for such teaching even with what might seem to be the most challenging student populations and curricula. Schoeberlein gives formal instructions for each student mindfulness activity. However, as with her informal teacher practices and with the approaches described in my book, Tuning In: Mindfulness in Teaching and Learning, these examples best serve to inspire teachers to develop approaches that fit their specific situations.
Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness: A Guide for Anyone Who Teaches Anything OverviewMindfulness is going mainstream, and author Deborah Schoeberlein pioneers its practical application in K-12 education. By showing teachers how to tune into what's happening, inside and around them, she offers educators fresh, straightforward approaches to training attention and generating caring in the classroom. Mindful Teaching and Teaching Mindfulness emphasizes how the teacher's personal familiarity with mindfulness seeds the ground for an education infused with attention, awareness, kindness, empathy, compassion, and gratitude. The book follows a teacher from morning to night on typical school day. The schedule provides a practical context for applying and promoting mindfulness throughout the day. Brief, readable segments focus on a full range of topics including classroom procedures, lesson structure, and pacing, as well as social and emotional learning. This approach familiarizes the reader with mindfulness and fosters gradual and steady skills development. Reading the book catalyzes readers' insights and inspires the teacher's self-confidence in applying mindfulness- personally and professionally.

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The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate Review

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The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate ReviewThis is a useful book. The Mindful Child offers simple techniques to help parents help children (of all ages) gain more control over their responses to the world -increasing happiness and calmness as a result. The author does a great job of distilling age-old mindfulness and meditation techniques into simple exercises and games that children and any non yoga-fanatic can do. You can tell this is a book written by a real mom who has seen the results in action - her sincerity and conviction come through throughout - and that makes a huge difference for me. I gave the book to my sister who has two young kids and both she and I found it enormously helpful. We had fun playing the games and activities and the kids did too! Without being preachy or new-agey, this book offers way to get kids to tune out the noise of tv, internet etc. and focus more on themselves. One exercise asks them to imagine what could be inside a closed box, which, in a group setting, encourages kids to be creative and creates a suspenseful, engaging scenario; the game helps children not only use their creativity, it helps them become better aware of each other as well.The Mindful Child: How to Help Your Kid Manage Stress and Become Happier, Kinder, and More Compassionate OverviewThe techniques of mindful awareness have helped millions of adults reduce stress in their lives. Now, children—who are under more pressure than ever before—can learn to protect themselves with these well-established methods adapted for their ages. Based on a program affiliated with UCLA, The Mindful Child is a groundbreaking book, the first to show parents how to teach these transformative practices to their children.Mindful awareness works by enabling you to pay closer attention to what is happening within you—your thoughts, feelings, and emotions—so you can better understand what is happening to you. The Mindful Child extends the vast benefits of mindfulness training to children from four to eighteen years old with age-appropriate exercises, songs, games, and fables that Susan Kaiser Greenland has developed over more than a decade of teaching mindful awareness to kids. These fun and friendly techniques build kids' inner and outer awareness and attention, which positively affects their academic performance as well as their social and emotional skills, such as making friends, being compassionate and kind to others, and playing sports, while also providing tools to manage stress and to overcome specific challenges like insomnia, overeating, ADHD, hyper-perfectionism, anxiety, and chronic pain. When children take a few moments before responding to stressful situations, they allow their own healthy inner compasses to click in and guide them to become more thoughtful, resilient, and empathetic. The step-by-step process of mental training presented in The Mindful Child provides tools from which all children—and all families—will benefit.

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Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation Review

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Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation ReviewI began reading "Mindsight" eagerly because I have a strong interest in mindfulness therapy and Siegel comes highly recommended. I found, however, that I could never get really engaged in the book. I pushed forward and read the whole thing, because Siegel obviously knows his stuff and writes in a clear and easy manner. But I didn't find what I was looking for.
It took a while to figure out why this book was not for me. Three reasons:
First, this book isn't primarily about mindfulness as its title suggests. Siegel has his own well-developed system of therapy. It includes mindfulness, yes, but also a lot of neuroscience, interpersonal therapy, and psychoanalysis (i.e., using insights about one's upbringing to bring about a cure.) Though the word psychoanalysis is never used, it seems to me that it is the dominant strand in his system.
For example, he writes, "With mindsight I was able to make use of the reflections that arose from that conflict [a run-in with his son] to arrive at more clarifying insights into my own childhood experiences."
So because mindfulness is not the main theme, or for some other reason, it is not very thoroughly developed--certainly not as much as in many other books I've read. Hence my disappointment.
The second problem I had is that the bulk of the book is made up of clinical cases (stories of the lives of the author's patients and the therapy he does with them) and stories from the author's life. I find that a few such cases in this kind of book can be illuminating, but reading one story after another becomes tedious.
Third, this book is not directed at helping the reader use the techniques that are mentioned.
None of these observations are meant as criticisms--just some information for anyone trying to make a decision. But if you are mainly interested in mindfulness therapy and would like to use it in your own life, I would recommend "The Mindful Way Through Depression" -- a clear, insightful, and practical book, written by researchers in the field.Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation Overview

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