Would you like to establish an animated classroom atmosphere where students are motivated to gain skills, absorb knowledge, express opinions, and examine alternatives? Would you like your students to reflect on the quality of their thinking and learning? With her usual eloquence, Elisheva Zeffren articulates students’ need to think critically, formulate conclusions, and uncover what is relevant and important to modern life. The lucid writing style, easy-to-read charts, creative exercises, practical and concrete goals, make this book simple to revisit. Educators can take the innovative ideas back to their classrooms and implement them with little or no preparation.

Motivated Minds--a practical guide to ensuring your child's success in school. What makes students succeed in school? For the past twenty years, the focus has been on building children's self-esteem to help them achieve more in the classroom. But positive reinforcement hasn't necessarily resulted in measureable academic improvement. Through extensive research, combined with ongoing classroom implementation of their ideas, Deborah Stipek, Dean of the School of Education at Stanford, and Kathy Seal have created a program that will encourage motivation and a love of learning in children from toddlerhood through elementary school. Stipek and Seal maintain that parents and teachers can build a solid foundation for learning by helping children to develop the key elements of success: competency, autonomy, curiosity, and critical relationships. The authors offer both practical advice and strategies on understanding different learning styles for Math and reading as well as down-to-earth tips about how to manage difficult issues -- competition, grades, praise, bribes, and rewards -- that inevitably arise for parents and teachers. Most important, Stipek and Seal help parents create an enriching environment for their children at home that will mesh with the school experience and become a positive, effective climate for learning.

"...an engaging and enlightening account from which we all can benefit."—The Wall Street Journal A better way to combat knee-jerk biases and make smarter decisions, from Julia Galef, the acclaimed expert on rational decision-making. When it comes to what we believe, humans see what they want to see. In other words, we have what Julia Galef calls a "soldier" mindset. From tribalism and wishful thinking, to rationalizing in our personal lives and everything in between, we are driven to defend the ideas we most want to believe—and shoot down those we don't. But if we want to get things right more often, argues Galef, we should train ourselves to have a "scout" mindset. Unlike the soldier, a scout's goal isn't to defend one side over the other. It's to go out, survey the territory, and come back with as accurate a map as possible. Regardless of what they hope to be the case, above all, the scout wants to know what's actually true. In The Scout Mindset, Galef shows that what makes scouts better at getting things right isn't that they're smarter or more knowledgeable than everyone else. It's a handful of emotional skills, habits, and ways of looking at the world—which anyone can learn. With fascinating examples ranging from how to survive being stranded in the middle of the ocean, to how Jeff Bezos avoids overconfidence, to how superforecasters outperform CIA operatives, to Reddit threads and modern partisan politics, Galef explores why our brains deceive us and what we can do to change the way we think.

A cutting-edge, research-based inquiry into how we influence those around us and how understanding the brain can help us change minds for the better. In The Influential Mind, neuroscientist Tali Sharot takes us on a thrilling exploration of the nature of influence. We all have a duty to affect others—from the classroom to the boardroom to social media. But how skilled are we at this role, and can we become better? It turns out that many of our instincts—from relying on facts and figures to shape opinions, to insisting others are wrong or attempting to exert control—are ineffective, because they are incompatible with how people’s minds operate. Sharot shows us how to avoid these pitfalls, and how an attempt to change beliefs and actions is successful when it is well-matched with the core elements that govern the human brain. Sharot reveals the critical role of emotion in influence, the weakness of data and the power of curiosity. Relying on the latest research in neuroscience, behavioral economics and psychology, the book provides fascinating insight into the complex power of influence, good and bad. Praise for The Influential Mind Winner of the 2018 British Psychological Society Book Award Selected as a Best Book of 2017 by Forbes, The Times (UK), The Huffington Post, Bloomberg, Greater Good Magazine, Inc., Stanford Business School,and more “Sharot . . . covers the topic more fully and more authoritatively in a book whose title gives appropriately equal billing to thought, behavior and neurons. . . . Her book is a witty survey of techniques to influence and guide human behavior.” —The New York Times Book Review “This timely, intriguing book explains why it’s so difficult to shift the attitudes and actions of others—and what we can do about it.” —Adam Grant, New York Times–bestselling author of Originals and Give and Take

This bestselling work has introduced hundreds of thousands of professionals and students to motivational interviewing (MI), a proven approach to helping people overcome ambivalence that gets in the way of change. William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick explain current thinking on the process of behavior change, present the principles of MI, and provide detailed guidelines for putting it into practice. Case examples illustrate key points and demonstrate the benefits of MI in addictions treatment and other clinical contexts. The authors also discuss the process of learning MI. The volume’s final section brings together an array of leading MI practitioners to present their work in diverse settings.

The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively early - though not always under that name - in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne imme diately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appointments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the 1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of Wollongong, and smaller groups active in many other parts of Australia and in New Zealand. "Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science" aims to provide a distinctive publication outlet for Australian and New Zealand scholars working in the general area of history, philosophy and social studies of science. Each volume comprises a group of essays on a connected theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with special expertise in that particular area. Papers address general issues, however, rather than local ones; parochial topics are avoided. Further more, though in each volume a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand, contributions from elsewhere are by no means ruled out. Quite the reverse, in fact - they are actively encour aged wherever appropriate to the balance of the volume in question.

Unlike the media would have you believe, most black males find great value in education. They want to believe that they have a special gift and that they can make a difference in the world. The problem is that they have ill feelings about how society has deprived them of the most qualified teachers and the best ways to be engaged in their own education. As a consequence of repeatedly being marginalized, criticized, and put down by society and teachers, they do not feel motivated to attend school or to produce outstanding academic work. The Secrets for Motivating, Educating, and Lifting the Spirit of African American Males contains essays that center on how to help educators and parents to equip young black males with the drive necessary to craft fulfilling lives for themselves so they dont slip through the cracks in the educational system. Historically, we are still dealing with what happens to the image of Black people in the minds of white people. A book like this helps to make certain that the information teachers provide to all studentsregardless of their racewill help them understand that the history of this country has made generation after generation of black students see themselves as academically and socially inferior to white people. Most importantly, its the teachersnot just black teachers, but all teachers who have to understand the power they have to change the mindset of society. Changing how society thinks about Black people, particularly Black males, is a task teachers can truly accomplish because they have the power to create lesson plans that challenge how students think about each other. For such lessons are important for changing the attitudes and beliefs of the entire community in which we live. REVEREND C.T. VIVIAN, A Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement, Author, Educator, and a Close Friend of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This book provides a fresh perspective for understanding the problems associated with the education of Black males. As a minister, I have not encountered a project that gathers the collective wisdom of a group of over 20 Black male educators who are dedicated to helping the world save young Black males. When all their ideas come together, they are bound to create a storm of new thinking about how all of us can work together. As a spiritual leader, my role is to help young Black males understand that the same God that was in Dr. King is the same God that is in them. This is a difficult lesson for some Black males who have been brainwashed to see themselves as having no say about the outcome of their lives. This book will help us, including those in the ministry, to reevaluate the thinking patterns of our boys so that we can better prepare them for the critical thinking that is required for life in the 21st century. REVEREND ROBERT KILGORE, Assistant Pastor at Hillside International Truth Center, Atlanta, GA

From wired campuses to smart classrooms to massive open online courses (MOOCs), digital technology is now firmly embedded in higher education. But the dizzying pace of innovation, combined with a dearth of evidence on the effectiveness of new tools and programs, challenges educators to articulate how technology can best fit into the learning experience. Minds Online is a concise, nontechnical guide for academic leaders and instructors who seek to advance learning in this changing environment, through a sound scientific understanding of how the human brain assimilates knowledge. Drawing on the latest findings from neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Michelle Miller explores how attention, memory, and higher thought processes such as critical thinking and analytical reasoning can be enhanced through technology-aided approaches. The techniques she describes promote retention of course material through frequent low‐stakes testing and practice, and help prevent counterproductive cramming by encouraging better spacing of study. Online activities also help students become more adept with cognitive aids, such as analogies, that allow them to apply learning across situations and disciplines. Miller guides instructors through the process of creating a syllabus for a cognitively optimized, fully online course. She presents innovative ideas for how to use multimedia effectively, how to take advantage of learners’ existing knowledge, and how to motivate students to do their best work and complete the course. For a generation born into the Internet age, educational technology designed with the brain in mind offers a natural pathway to the pleasures and rewards of deep learning.

Motivating Teen and Preteen Readers: How Teachers and Parents Can Lead the Way contains over 1,000 diverse, original, fun, creative, absurd, challenging questions on reading that will inspire adolescent reading lives from the inside out. The four books of questions contained in this volume are designed to help kids help themselves find their ways to a desire to read.

Written specifically for teachers, Motivating Students to Learn offers a wealth of research-based principles on the subject of student motivation for use by classroom teachers. Now in its fourth edition, this book discusses specific classroom strategies by tying these principles to the realities of contemporary schools, curriculum goals, and classroom dynamics. The authors lay out effective extrinsic and intrinsic strategies to guide teachers in their day-to-day practice, provide guidelines for adapting to group and individual differences, and discuss ways to reach students who have become discouraged or disaffected learners. This edition features new material on the roles that classroom goal setting, developing students’ interest, and teacher-student and peer relationships play in student motivation. It has been reorganized to address six key questions that combine to explain why students may or may not be motivated to learn. By focusing more closely on the teacher as the motivator, this text presents a wide range of motivational methods to help students see value in the curriculum and lessons taught in the classroom.