The unconscious sprang to the attention of the West a hundred years ago, and we are still struggling to absorb its full impact. It was one thing to understand the concept, to see it and believe it, but another to live with it, to take in fully its challenge to our deepest cultural assumptions. Today, as we expand our understanding of its reach, we are still coming to grips with what it means. This “new unconscious” is driven by the identities we assume, the groups we belong to, the ideas w...

Comparing math teaching practices in Japan and Germany with those in the United States, two leading researchers offer a surprising new view of teaching and a bold action plan for improving education inside the American classroom.For years our schools and children have lagged behind international standards in reading, arithmetic, and most other areas of academic achievement. It is no secret that American schools are in dire need of improvement, and that education has...

Few writers ask us to question our fundamental assumptions about education as provocatively as Alfie Kohn. Time magazine has called him'perhaps the country's most outspoken critic of education's fixation on grades [and] test scores.' And the Washington Post says he is 'the most energetic and charismatic figure standing in the way of a major federal effort to make standardized curriculums and tests a fact of life in every U.S. school.'In this new collection of essa...

With four simple truths as his framework, Charles Murray, the bestselling coauthor of The Bell Curve, sweeps away the hypocrisy, wishful thinking, and upside-down priorities that grip America’s educational establishment.Ability varies. Children differ in their ability to learn academic material. Doing our best for every child requires, above all else, that we embrace that simplest of truths. America’s educational system does its best to ignore it.Half of the childr...

Final thoughts from the now-deceased leader of narrative therapy.Michael White’s untimely death deprived therapists of a leading light. Here, available for the first time in book form, is a collection of the work he left behind—writings on topics dear to the psychotherapeutic world: turning points in therapy, conversations, resistance and therapist responsibility, couples therapy, and narrative responses to trauma.

Thoroughly revised and updated, the second edition of the landmark book Discussion as a Way of Teaching shows how to plan, conduct, and assess classroom discussions. Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill suggest exercises for starting discussions, strategies for maintaining their momentum, and ways to elicit diverse views and voices. The book also includes new exercises and material on the intersections between discussion and the encouragement of democracy in the classroom. T...

This book builds on two current developments in psychology scholarship and practice. The first centers on broad discontent with the individualist tradition in which the rational agent, or autonomous self, is considered the fundamental atom of social life. Critique of individualism spring not only from psychologists working in the academy, but also from communities of therapy and counseling. The second, and related development from which this work builds, is the search for alternatives to i...

This paperback edition, with a new introduction, offers a powerful, compelling, and unassailable argument for reforming America's schooling methods and ideas--by one of America's most important educators, and author of the bestselling Cultural Literacy.For over fifty years, American schools have operated under the assumption that challenging children academically is unnatural for them, that teachers do not need to know the subjects they teach, that the learning "pr...

The Learning SelfThis new book from the award-winning author of Psychology and Adult Learning puts the spotlight on the kind of learning that brings about significant personal change. Tennant explores the techniques, processes, and practices educators can use to promote learning that leads to change and examines assumptions about self and identity, how we are formed, and our capacity for change.The Learning Self addresses the different con...

Perkins reveals the common misguided strategies students use and offers teachers and parents advice on how they can help their children.Although there has been a great deal of impassioned debate over the sad state of American education today, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how children actually learn to think. But, as David Perkins demonstrates, we cannot solve our problems in this area simply by redistributing power or by asking children to regurgi...

The philosopher Cristina Bicchieri here develops her theory of social norms, most recently explained in her 2006 volume The Grammar of Society. Bicchieri challenges many of the fundamental assumptions of the social sciences. She argues that when it comes to human behavior, social scientists place too much stress on rational deliberation. In fact, many choices occur without much deliberation at all. Bicchieri's theory accounts for these automatic components of behavior, where indiv...

Vygotsky at Work and Play is an intimate portrayal of the Vygotskian-inspired approach to human development known as ‘social therapeutics’and ‘the psychology of becoming’. Holzman provides an accessible, practical-philosophical portrayal of a unique performance-based methodology of development and learning that draws upon a fresh reading of Vygotsky.This expanded edition includes new content dealing with how Lev Vygotsky’s work can be applied to profound social is...