What to read before you teach

Nuthall, G. (2007). The hidden lives of learners. New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) Press

One of the hardest things for any teacher, arriving as we do from a position of relative expertise and understanding, is to imagine what it would be like to be a student in our class. Where might they go wrong? What might they find difficult? 

Graham Nuthall's meticulous research in schools, consisting of recordings from individual students and classroom observations across thousands of hours of lessons, provides a hugely enlightening insight into the experience of being a learner (at any level). 

For example, students arrive at our classes with wildly differing beliefs about the subject and levels of prior experience, and this has a major effect on what they are able to learn. As a result, only about 15% of what a teacher wanted the students to know tends to be shared by the class by the end of a lesson!

This book helps us to think far more deeply about the actual mechanisms of learning, and how we as educators might need to be highly intentional in priming relevant prior knowledge in our students, actively shaping their learning environment, and allowing them repeated access to the content of our courses.

Willingham, D. T. (2021). Why don't students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. John Wiley & Sons

It's a question to which the answer seems both mind-numbingly obvious yet fraught with complexity. Humans, as a rule, like learning stuff, so school ought to be a joy for most students, right? Except it turns out that the kinds of learning that schools are mostly about are not that straightforward. And what Daniel Willingham does throughout this book is explore some core principles of cognitive psychology to explain why. Willingham has that rare ability to explain the most complex of ideas in simple ways that make you feel cleverer. Even as psychology teachers, curricular knowledge is often divorced from our pedagogical knowledge - how to actually teach in ways that work with, rather than against, the constraints of our 'cognitive architecture'. Willingham's work in translating research and theory into something accessible for teachers has underpinned a something of a revolution in some areas of school teaching.

Christodoulou, D. (2017). Making good progress? The future of assessment for learning. Oxford University Press-Children

Although primarily focused on the turbulent history of assessment in UK schools, Christodoulou's book provides a valuable primer on the types and purposes of assessment at any level and how to make informed decisions about what and when to assess our students. 

The most important message of Christodoulou's book is that the way we assess affects the inferences that we can make about our students and their learning. We naturally assume that, for example, we can make both summative inferences (how well our students are doing compared to others) and formative inferences (what students need to do to improve) from the same assessment. This is frequently not the case, however, or at least, as Christodoulou puts it, "the assessment which is able to fulfil summative and formative functions may not be ideal for either purpose" (Christodoulou, 2017, p. 58). We cannot have our assessment cake and eat it as readily as we might assume. 

Crehan, L. (2017). Cleverlands: The secrets behind the success of the world's education superpowers. Random House.

Engage in any conversation about school or education, and it's likely that at some point, someone will start talking about what happens in other countries around the world. "Oh, but you should see what they do in Finland," people say, "We could learn a thing or two from them". So, what is it about high-performing education systems in other countries that makes them so successful? And are there things we could learn from them that would work in our own settings? 

What Lucy Crehan does here is go beyond the rhetoric to find out for herself. Her book records her extensive travels to and research in those places that might be considered outliers in terms of their educational achievements - Finland, Japan, Singapore, China, and the USA. In doing so, she shines a light on what some of the highest-performing education systems have in common and what sets them apart. 

Goodwin, D., & Caviglioli, O. (2021). Organise Ideas: Thinking by Hand, Extending the Mind. John Catt.

"What if the language you're using to explain something is more complicated than the actual thing you're trying to explain?" Hearing Oliver Caviglioni ask this question at a conference talk was something of an epiphany. The central premise of Organise Ideas is that written language requires us to pass the meaning of sentences and paragraphs through tacit knowledge of grammatical structures and syntax. 

Where language is complex (or where readers have less developed language skills), this actually makes it harder to grasp new ideas and the connections between them. Visual representations, known as graphic organisers, on the other hand, impart meaning more directly because the relationship between ideas is automatically built into the organisation of the graphic. 

What makes this book even more useful is that each type of organiser is accompanied by a case study of a real teacher explaining how they've used it in their practice. And, of course, given the topic and the authors' expertise, the book is organised in a way that is both helpful to navigate and aesthetically pleasing, which sets it apart from most other books on education.

Solomon, A. (2012). Far from the tree: Parents, children and the search for identity. Simon and Schuster. 

A monumental book, both in actual size and in the scope of its ambition. Solomon examines children who have what he terms a 'horizontal' (as opposed to a 'vertical') identity; children whose identities are far removed from those of their parents, where the apple really has fallen far from the tree. Each chapter takes a different vertical identity, including homosexuality, autism, deafness, dwarfism, child prodigies, criminals and children born through rape. Commonalities emerge across these diverse groups, not least of which is the battle that parents are forced to fight against systems which do not easily accommodate their child, all whilst often wrestling with their conflicted feelings at the same time. Ultimately, what unfolds, though, is a tribute to the human spirit in adversity, and especially to the incredible resilience of parental love. 

As a psychology teacher, the book also allows us to consider the vagaries of our diagnostic categories, and the difficult balance to be struck between diagnosing (and 'treating') the pathological and celebrating the diverse. We're also reminded of the limitations of our knowledge in many areas, most powerfully schizophrenia, which appears the cruellest of all the afflictions in the book. 

Atkins, R. (2023). The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence. Wildfire.

Explaining stuff is the bread and butter of teaching. And it's simple, right? Well, no, actually.

Ros Atkins has never been a teacher, but what he does have is years of experience, boundless curiosity, and a relentless determination to ensure that what he communicates has the highest impact. Littered with examples from his career in journalism, Ros first dissects the anatomy of a good explanation and then reveals his careful and methodical process for how to get there, distilling years of wisdom gleaned from experimentation, research and practice. 

From selecting the right material to the careful choice of phrasing, for formal situations or impromptu chats, this book will help you prepare for any lesson, presentation or interview, and make sure you get your message across in the best possible way.

Kesey, K. (1962). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Teaching students about psychological research often involves introducing them to what Carl Rogers called 'the irreconcilable contradiction' of studying humans; the attempt to see them both as mechanistic objects of study and also as human beings: capable, responsible and free (Rogers, 1965). Kesey's account of life in a US mental hospital is a powerful reminder of this contradiction, even if his ultimate rejection of the whole system, or his somewhat gendered diagnosis of the original problem, is a message that many of us might not agree with.

The arrival of swaggering troublemaker McMurphy into 'Big Nurse' Ratched's mechanistic ward allows us to see its residents in a fresh, more humanised light. What makes their re-emergence into life truly memorable is that Kesey's counterpoint to Ratched's lack of respect and humanity is not a po-faced deference (which can be equally dehumanising in its own way). Instead, the characters emerge as funny and vital, worthy of humour without becoming the joke themselves. They become the irreconcilable contradiction, in other words, just as they should be.

Cline, P., & Hobbiss, M. (2025). How to Teach Psychology: An evidence-informed approach. John Catt Educational. 

You might have noticed that, for all their merits, none of the books so far actually tell you how to teach the subject of psychology! We noticed that too. Our new book, 'How to Teach Psychology: An evidence-informed approach', aims to fill that gap, to show how, in the words of Stephen Chew and colleagues, we can 'practice what we teach.'

In Section 1, we create what we call our 'psychology teaching framework', considering both the fundamentals of learning in general and the characteristic features of psychology as an academic discipline. We set out six key principles in each of these two areas. Putting both of these strands together, we then identify and describe seven key pedagogical implications for psychology teaching: what we should actually do in the classroom, how we should teach, design our curricula, assess, and provide feedback.

Although the book is primarily written with the teaching of psychology at school level in mind (we are both teachers of A-Level Psychology), the teaching framework and the decision-making processes laid out behind them can be used for teaching psychology at any level (they have been used successfully by one of us when also teaching undergraduates, for example).