100 books like Making Learning Visible

By Project Zero, Reggio Children,

Here are 100 books that Making Learning Visible fans have personally recommended if you like Making Learning Visible. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Democracy and Education

Howard Gardner Author Of The Essential Howard Gardner on Education

From my list on educating for the future.

Why am I passionate about this?

I always assumed that one day I would become a teacher. Yet, it was only by a circuitous route that I ended up focusing on education, taught at a Graduate School of Education, and was a founding member of Project Zero, a major education research center. In my book, I present the major ideas and programs with which I’ve been involved. (In a companion volume I present my “essential writings” on the Mind). While I am best known for developing the “theory of multiple intelligences,” I believe that this book provides a full portrait of my contributions.

Howard's book list on educating for the future

Howard Gardner Why did Howard love this book?

For anyone interested in view of education that is distinctly American and clearly progressive, Dewey’s writings—though challenging—are fundamental and, therefore, worth careful reading and re-reading. And of course, Dewey is read and valued all over the world. I wish that every child had the opportunity to attend a Dewey-inspired school.

By John Dewey,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Democracy and Education as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Some hundred years after John Dewey worked to illuminate what it means to educate and how public education serves as the bedrock of democracy, his seminal Democracy and Education speaks urgently not only to critical contemporary educational issues but to contemporary political issues as well. As mania for testing forces a steadily narrowing curriculum, Dewey explains why democracy cannot “flourish” if “the chief influences in selecting subject matter of instruction are utilitarian ends narrowly conceived for the masses.” As such utilitarian subject matter is increasingly placed online, isolating individual students and their electronic screens, he insists that education happens not…


Book cover of The Process of Education

Howard Gardner Author Of The Essential Howard Gardner on Education

From my list on educating for the future.

Why am I passionate about this?

I always assumed that one day I would become a teacher. Yet, it was only by a circuitous route that I ended up focusing on education, taught at a Graduate School of Education, and was a founding member of Project Zero, a major education research center. In my book, I present the major ideas and programs with which I’ve been involved. (In a companion volume I present my “essential writings” on the Mind). While I am best known for developing the “theory of multiple intelligences,” I believe that this book provides a full portrait of my contributions.

Howard's book list on educating for the future

Howard Gardner Why did Howard love this book?

When I met Jerry Bruner in the summer of 1965, I had expected to become a clinical psychologist or perhaps a psychoanalyst. However, the chance to work as a research assistant for Bruner as he was developing a social studies curriculum for middle schools was transformative: I decided to become a cognitively oriented developmental psychologist with a focus on the arts.

Both the ideas that Bruner introduced me to and the way in which he interweaved the humanities and social sciences in his writings are never far from my literary consciousness. I am glad that my children had a chance to attend schools where Bruner’s ideas were taken seriously.

By Jerome Bruner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Process of Education as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In this classic argument for curriculum reform in early education, Jerome Bruner shows that the basic concepts of science and the humanities can be grasped intuitively at a very early age. He argues persuasively that curricula should he designed to foster such early intuitions and then build on them in increasingly formal and abstract ways as education progresses.

Bruner's foundational case for the spiral curriculum has influenced a generation of educators and will continue to be a source of insight into the goals and methods of the educational process.


Book cover of Finnish Lessons 3.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

Howard Gardner Author Of The Essential Howard Gardner on Education

From my list on educating for the future.

Why am I passionate about this?

I always assumed that one day I would become a teacher. Yet, it was only by a circuitous route that I ended up focusing on education, taught at a Graduate School of Education, and was a founding member of Project Zero, a major education research center. In my book, I present the major ideas and programs with which I’ve been involved. (In a companion volume I present my “essential writings” on the Mind). While I am best known for developing the “theory of multiple intelligences,” I believe that this book provides a full portrait of my contributions.

Howard's book list on educating for the future

Howard Gardner Why did Howard love this book?

A small group of scholars and educators have taken the ideas of progressive education seriously and made them available to ambitious and adventurous educators worldwide.

In his explanations of why Finland has become among the most admired systems in the world, with three editions of this “instant classic,” Sahlberg has provided an important and timely model for progressive educators worldwide.

By Pasi Sahlberg,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Finnish Lessons 3.0 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The first two editions of Finnish Lessons described how a small Nordic nation built a school system that provided access to a world-class education for all of its young people. Now available in 30 languages, this Grawemeyer Award-winning book continues to influence education policies and school practices around the globe. In this Third Edition, Pasi Sahlberg updates the story of how Finland sustains its exemplary educational performance, including how it responds to turbulent changes at home and throughout the world. Finnish Lessons 3.0 includes important new material about: teachers and teacher education teaching children with special needs the role of…


Book cover of The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach

Howard Gardner Author Of The Essential Howard Gardner on Education

From my list on educating for the future.

Why am I passionate about this?

I always assumed that one day I would become a teacher. Yet, it was only by a circuitous route that I ended up focusing on education, taught at a Graduate School of Education, and was a founding member of Project Zero, a major education research center. In my book, I present the major ideas and programs with which I’ve been involved. (In a companion volume I present my “essential writings” on the Mind). While I am best known for developing the “theory of multiple intelligences,” I believe that this book provides a full portrait of my contributions.

Howard's book list on educating for the future

Howard Gardner Why did Howard love this book?

Among professors of education of our time, Lee Shulman stands out as a thinker, a speaker, and the adviser and role model of scores of excellent researchers and practitioners.

Shulman is primarily a writer of powerful essays. The educational world is fortunate that this volume collects his best thinking and writing. I wish that every teacher and every researcher would read and absorb Shulman’s vision of good education.

By Lee S. Shulman,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Wisdom of Practice as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

What do teachers need to know in order to teach well? How important is the depth and quality of teachers' content knowledge as a critical aspect of their ability to teach? How can teachers best be educated, and how can we assess their accomplishments as teachers? In what ways is the professional preparation of teachers comparable to the preparation of physicians and other members of learned professions? What kinds of educational research can provide deeper understanding of teaching, learning, and the reform of education? These are just some of the many questions answered in this landmark collection of Lee Shulman's…


Book cover of Money and Empire: The International Gold Standard, 1890-1914

Perry Mehrling Author Of Money and Empire: Charles P. Kindleberger and the Dollar System

From my list on the forces making the global money system.

Why am I passionate about this?

My interest in money (understanding it, not so much making it!) dates from undergraduate days at Harvard, 1977-1981, exactly the time when the dollar system was being put back together under Volcker after the international monetary disorder and domestic stagflation of the 1970s. The previous decade had very much disrupted the personal economics of my family, perhaps in much the same way that the Depression had disrupted Kindleberger’s, and set me off on a lifelong quest to understand why. Forty years and four books later, I feel like I have made some progress, and hope that my book can save readers forty years in their own question to understand money!

Perry's book list on the forces making the global money system

Perry Mehrling Why did Perry love this book?

My own book title is explicitly an homage to this book, which tells the story of the sterling standard in its heyday. 

It is my dream that readers will put my book next to this one on their bookshelves, reading mine as a continuation of the story that DeCecco tells so masterfully. He is more economic historian, and I am more historian of economic ideas, so the books are different (and his original was in Italian), but they can be read as in conversation with one another. 

This is another book that I look forward to rereading, now that I know more, and engaging more deeply and systematically.

Book cover of A Valley in Italy: The Many Seasons of a Villa in Umbria

Dominic Smith Author Of Return to Valetto

From my list on armchair travel through Italy and Italian history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve just spent the last few years writing Return to Valetto, about a nearly abandoned village in Umbria and the last ten people who live there. In 2018, I received an NEA grant to conduct research in Italy and I visited about a dozen abandoned and nearly abandoned towns all across Italy. While I was traveling, I immersed myself in books about Italy—from history and biography to memoir and fiction. The books on my list were stepping stones in my education about all things Italian and I hope you find them as transporting as I did!

Dominic's book list on armchair travel through Italy and Italian history

Dominic Smith Why did Dominic love this book?

If you’ve ever fantasized about restoring a crumbling medieval Italian villa, then you’ll get to live that experience vicariously through this memoir.

The author has a wonderful sense of the absurd as she recounts her family’s multi-year efforts to turn a roofless villa into their dream home, complete with a complicated teenage daughter who is trying to find her way in the rural Italian countryside where the family has been transplanted.

Brimming with idiosyncratic and endearing characters. 

By Lisa St Aubin De Teran,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Valley in Italy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The author recounts a year she spent in San Orsela, a small town in the Umbrian hils of Italy, sharing portraits of her Italian friends and a celebration of the seasonal cycle


Book cover of A Helping Hand

Emilia Bernhard Author Of Designs on the Dead

From my list on subtle cruelty.

Why am I passionate about this?

As someone who’s had a lifelong interest in psychology, especially abnormal psychology, I’ve always been fascinated the small destructions some people inflict on others – sometimes even on themselves. For me the greatest crime is not to kill someone but to reduce them by making their life uncomfortable or unwelcome. The ability to do this is what I would call a “negative skill.” It’s not easy, but some people do it uncannily well, and without caring. Perhaps because this is so alien to me, I remain riveted by stories that portray it, and some cases attempt to explain it. These are a few of those stories.

Emilia's book list on subtle cruelty

Emilia Bernhard Why did Emilia love this book?

It’s criminal that Celia Dale’s books are almost all out of print. 

Dale dwells in the world of people you wouldn’t look at twice – nice old ladies, sympathetic homemakers, slightly out-of-date romeos – who practice a kind of cruelty that isn’t necessarily obvious to the outside world, but that is nonetheless terrible.

Helping Hand deals with a couple who hurry old ladies to their deaths by means of kindness that’s actually cruel, and a young relative of one of those old ladies, who is herself grotesquely self-centered and uncaring. 

Fortunately, the book is saved by the presence of a decent young Italian woman, who provides hope in a black world.

By Celia Dale,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Helping Hand as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the past months Mrs Fingal’s legs had grown very weak. She could move from the bed to the chair only if she held on to the furniture. ‘Be careful, dear,’ Mrs Evans would say, beating up the pillows and clearing away all the oddments hidden under them, ‘you don’t want to fall and break your leg.’

This is a tale of ruthless greed, exploitation and suffocating, skin-crawling terror.

Middle-aged Josh and Maisie Evans lead a seemingly unremarkable life. When their elderly lodger Flo dies and leaves them her Estate, they head to Italy on holiday, to take in the…


Book cover of A Feast of Narrative: Volume 1

Joseph L. Cacibauda Author Of Not for Self: A Sicilian Life and Death in Marion

From my list on Sicilian Italian history and the people.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in New Orleans around Cajun French and Italians. My father spoke Cajun French, English, and Sicilian. I grew up thinking his Sicilian was Italian mixed with Cajun French. We considered ourselves Italian, never aware that my grandparents, paternal and maternal, emigrated from Sicily and were born just after Sicily became part of Italy (1861). Knowing nothing of Sicily, including the Sicilian spelling of my own surname and my father’s Sicilian first name, I used the computer to contact distant relatives in Sicily, discover records online, and eventually visited Sicily to find actual documents. My research led to my passion and my first book, After Laughing Comes Crying.

Joseph's book list on Sicilian Italian history and the people

Joseph L. Cacibauda Why did Joseph love this book?

This is a three-volume anthology of Italian American writers recalling family dinners, holidays, funerals, weddings, Italian customs, and Italian relatives. These volumes depict Italians in their everyday life far removed from any mafioso dramas. Reading these stories helps Italians verify the meanings and pronunciations of Italian words and gestures, those things called “Italian” used long ago but since forgotten with the passing of our elders.

By Tiziano Thomas Dossena (editor), Dominic Anthony Campanile (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Feast of Narrative as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This collection of short stories, published by "Idea Press" is aimed at presenting the richness of styles and creativity of Italian American writers. It consists of two sections for a total of twenty-three short stories, eight of them nonfiction and fifteen of them fiction, and eighteen authors. The writers chosen by the editor to be included in this anthology are from a wide range of professional backgrounds, but ultimately most of them are published authors with an extensive experience on their curricula, as the reader may infer from their biographies.Altogether, the stories that appear in this anthology explore different topics,…


Book cover of Emotional Arenas: Life, Love, and Death in 1870s Italy

Barbara H. Rosenwein Author Of Love: A History in Five Fantasies

From my list on the history of emotions.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a writer, teacher, and researcher who has always been interested in my own emotions and those of others. But I decided to write about the emotions of the past only after I became a historian of the Middle Ages. My discoveries began with the early medieval period. Now I enjoy looking at the full sweep of Western history. I have come to realize that at no time did we all share the same feelings nor evaluate them the same way. Instead, we live and have always lived in “emotional communities” with others who share our feelings—and alongside still others who do not. I hope my booklist will pique your interest in this new and exciting field.

Barbara's book list on the history of emotions

Barbara H. Rosenwein Why did Barbara love this book?

To the many approaches of modern historians—the emotional standards of the Stearnses, the emotional regimes of Reddy, the emotional communities of my own work—Mark Seymour here adds an important dimension, a study of the places and media in which emotions are expressed, from the courtroom to the love letter. He shows not only how emotions aroused by one venue may mean different things to different people, but also how the clash of such emotions may help modify and mold new forms of emotional expression and create new objects of emotional focus.

By Mark Seymour,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Emotional Arenas as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Based on the records of a murder trial that transfixed all of Italy in the late 1870s, this study makes use of a dramatic court case to develop a new paradigm for the history of emotions - the 'emotional arena'. Set in the decade following Italian unification, the context was one of notable cultural variety. An as-yet unexplored aspect of this was that the experience and expression of emotions were as variable as the regions making up the new nation. Through a close
examination of the spaces in which daily lives, loves, and deaths unfolded - from marital homes to…


Book cover of Sawdust Caesar: The Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism

Martin M. Winkler Author Of Arminius the Liberator: Myth and Ideology

From my list on ideological and popular uses of ancient Rome.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am Professor of Classics at George Mason University. I learned about ancient Romans and Greeks in my native Germany, when I attended a humanist high school, possibly the oldest in the country. (It was founded during the reign of Charlemagne, as the eastern half of the Roman Empire was still flourishing.) My mother once informed me that I betrayed my passion for stories long before I could read because I enthusiastically used to tear pages out of books. In my teens I became fascinated with stories told in moving images. I have been a bibliophile and, em, cinemaniac ever since and have pursued both my obsessions in my publications.

Martin's book list on ideological and popular uses of ancient Rome

Martin M. Winkler Why did Martin love this book?

An American journalist, expelled from Italy in 1925, traces roots, rise, and rule of Il Duce in this 1935 book, which is as vivid as its title.

Mussolini appears as a cheap showman, who, “acting the Hero,” revived ancient Roman pomp and spectacles. He was also aware of the power of mass media, especially the cinema, “posing before men and moviemen.”

One of the virtues of Seldes’ book are the extensive quotations, which unmask Mussolini and others in their own words. Fascist documents, quoted at length, include “The Fascist Decalogue” (note its VIII. Commandment!) and the “Fascist Catechism,” which must be read to be (dis)believed.

Seldes’ book has become valuable again in the current age of assorted domestic and foreign media- and image-obsessed demagogues, autocrats, and dictators.

Book cover of Democracy and Education
Book cover of The Process of Education
Book cover of Finnish Lessons 3.0: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?

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Interested in Italy, the gold standard, and Rome?

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