I got a text an hour ago from my student teacher from last year. He was in a box at Madison Square Garden about to see his first Rush show. Lucky dog!

That got me thinking about teacher ed programs, which led me to recall the many chats I’ve had over the years with young teachers earning their M.A.T.s about what they are being assigned to read by their professors. I was often shocked that books I thought would be de rigueur were not on the syllabus.

Here are 5 books I think any future high school social studies teacher should read.

  1. Jill Lepore’s beautiful American history book These Truths. Forget Howard Zinn, read this wonderful, comprehensive, narrative history instead.

  2. John Hattie’s Visible Learning for Teachers. I first heard about Hattie from a friend and took a deep dive into his oeuvre, especially as it relates to social studies. What Hattie does so well is explain, based on all the research, what actually works to produce actual learning.

  3. Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking by a gaggle of experts, including John Hattie. This wonderful, short book about the importance of knowledge (aka, facts) should be mandatory reading for future and current educators. The argument isn’t trendy, but I agree with it completely: higher order thinking is not possible if people don’t have a strong foundational base of knowledge.

  4. How Teaching Happens, by Paul A. Kirschner (one of the co-authors of the book mentioned above), Carl Hendrick, and Jim Heal. This book is a review of 30 seminal books and papers that teachers should know about. It is a follow up to their similarly styled book, How Learning Happens.

  5. Make History: A Practical Guide for Middle and High School History Instruction by Art Worrell and Paul Bambrick-Santoyo. As the title emphasizes, this book is practical and contains a ton of easy to implement ideas for any high school social studies class.