Change Learning

The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach

Over the past forty years, educators there have evolved a distinctive innovative approach that supports children’s well-being and fosters their intellectual development through a systematic focus on symbolic representation. Young children (from birth to age six) are encouraged to explore their environment and express themselves through many “languages,” or modes of expression, including words, movement, drawing, painting, sculpture, shadow play, collage, and music.

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

New evidence from many branches of science has significantly added to our understanding of what it means to know, from the neural processes that occur during learning to the influence of culture on what people see and absorb.

Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation

Frans Johansson’s _The Medici Effect _shows how breakthrough ideas most often occur when we bring concepts from one field into a new, unfamiliar territory, and offers examples how we can turn the ideas we discover into path-breaking innovations.

(Book description from the publisher, Harvard Business School Press)

Teaching with the Brain in Mind

Every year, millions of parents trust that the professionals who teach their children know something about the brain and processes of learning. But most schools of education offer psychology, not neurology, courses. At best, these psychology courses provide indirect information about the brain and how children actually learn.

Teaching with the Brain in Mind fills this gap with the latest practical, easy-to-understand research on learning and the brain. Consider important questions such as

The Primal Teen: What the New Discoveries about the Teenage Brain Tell Us about Our Kids

While many members of the scientific community have long held that the growing pains of adolescence are primarily psychological, Barbara Strauch highlights the physical nature of the transformation, offering parents and educators a new perspective on erratic teenage behavior.

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

In this revolutionary look at the brain, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, M.D., provides an introduction to both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they’ve transformed. From stroke patients learning to speak again to the remarkable case of a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, The Brain That Changes Itself will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.

(Book description by the publisher, Penguin Books)

Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness

In Becoming Human, noted anthropologist and renaissance man Ian Tattersall explores what makes us uniquely human, the qualities that set us apart from our ancestors, and the significance of our knowledge. A worldwide tour of discovery, Tattersall takes the reader from 30,000-year-old cave paintings in France and anthropological digs in Africa, to examining human behavior in a New York restaurant.

Magic Trees of the Mind : How to Nurture Your Child's Intelligence, Creativity, and Emotions from Birth Through Adolescence

At each stage of development, the brain’s ability to gain new skills and process information is refined. As a leading researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, Marion Diamond has been a pioneer in this field of research. Now, Diamond and award-winning science writer Janet Hopson present a comprehensive enrichment program designed to help parents prepare their children for a lifetime of learning.

(Book description by publisher, Plume Books)

Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain

The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future

Despite all of society’s advances, our problems proliferate. Wars abound, environmental degradation accelerates, economies topple overnight, and pandemics such as AIDS and tuberculosis continue to spread. The Internet and other media help to disseminate knowledge, but they’ve also created an “info-glut” and left us too little time to process it. What’s more, advances in technology have made the world so bewilderingly fast-paced and complex that fewer people are able even to grasp the problems, let alone generate solutions.

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