Are you thinking about becoming an instructional designer? You’re not alone! Instructional design is one of the fastest growing fields, but it’s also a bit confusing. Many of the best instructional designers you know of fell into the role by accident and didn’t have dreams or ambitions of designing learning experiences for a living.

School discipline is broken. Too often, the kids who need our help the most are viewed as disrespectful, out of control, and beyond help, and are often the recipients of our most ineffective, most punitive interventions. These students - and their parents, teachers, and administrators - are frustrated and desperate for answers. Dr. Ross W. Greene, author of the acclaimed book The Explosive Child, offers educators and parents a different framework for understanding challenging behavior.

Mathematics is a fundamental part of life, yet every one of us has a unique relationship with learning and understanding the subject. Working with numbers may inspire confidence in our abilities or provoke anxiety and trepidation. Stanford researcher, mathematics education professor, and the leading expert on math learning Dr. Jo Boaler argues that our differences are the key to unlocking our greatest mathematics potential.

In Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray argues that our children, if free to pursue their own interests through play, will not only learn all they need to know but will do so with energy and passion. Children come into this world burning to learn, equipped with the curiosity, playfulness, and sociability to direct their own education. Yet we have squelched such instincts in a school model originally developed to indoctrinate, not to promote intellectual growth.

Visible thinking is a research-based approach to teaching thinking, begun at Harvard's Project Zero, that develops students' thinking dispositions while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study. Rather than a set of fixed lessons, visible thinking is a varied collection of practices, including thinking routines, small sets of questions, or a short sequence of steps as well as the documentation of student thinking. 

The moving memoir of a scientist coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling at the forefront of the AI revolution.

In Teaching to Transgress, Bell Hooks - writer, teacher, and insurgent black intellectual - writes about a new kind of education, education as the practice of freedom. Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for Hooks, the teacher's most important goal. Bell Hooks speakes to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings. This is the rare book about teachers and students that dares to raise questions about eros and rage, grief and reconciliation, and the future of teaching itself.

Run a Google search for “black girls” - what will you find? “Big Booty” and other sexually explicit terms are likely to come up as top search terms. But, if you type in “white girls”, the results are radically different. The suggested porn sites and un-moderated discussions about “why black women are so sassy” or “why black women are so angry” presents a disturbing portrait of black womanhood in modern society. In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities.

When change requires you to challenge people's familiar reality, it can be difficult, dangerous work. Whatever the context - whether in the private or the public sector - many will feel threatened as you push though major changes. But as a leader, you need to find a way to make it work.

In this follow-up to Cultivating Genius, Dr. Gholdy Muhammad adds a fifth pursuit—joy—to her groundbreaking instructional model. She defines joy as more than celebration and happiness, but also as wellness, beauty, healing, and justice for oneself and across humanity. She shows how teaching from cultural and historical realities can enhance our efforts to cultivate identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and—indeed—joy for all students, giving them a powerful purpose to learn and contribute to the world.