Here are 59 books that When the Adults Change, Everything Changes fans have personally recommended if you like
When the Adults Change, Everything Changes.
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I’ve been obsessed with making the future a better place since I was 8 years old and spent my evenings hanging out in a local community center. I realized that things got better when people who cared showed up for each other. I am now a philanthropic futurist and have spent my career dedicated to helping visionary leaders build a more beautiful and equitable future. All of the books on this list have inspired me, and I hope they inspire you, too. If we all do our small part, we can ensure we have a Star Trek future and not a Hunger Games future.
I absolutely loved this book. It taught me how to follow the cues of nature to solve complex problems, a lesson I had never considered before. Inspired by Octavia Butler, it is a blend of radical self-help and practical guidance for shaping the future, both personally and collectively.
I found the emphasis on change and adaptability particularly powerful. Rather than resisting the world’s constant flux, it encouraged me to embrace it, map the patterns around me, and use them to influence outcomes. This approach felt deeply grounded in both science and spirituality, making it all the more impactful.
Emergent Strategy has transformed the way I think about problem-solving, community-building, and my role (and responsibility) in shaping the future.
In the tradition of Octavia Butler, radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help to shape the futures we want.
Inspired by Octavia Butler's explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This…
Adele Bates is a Behaviour & Education Specialist who empowers school leaders and teachers to support pupils with behavioural needs and SEMH to thrive with their education. She’s an International Keynote Speaker, a featured expert on teenagers and behaviour for BBC Radio 4, the author of "Miss, I Don't Give A Sh*t", Engaging with Challenging Behaviour in Schools, from Sage & Corwin Press, and is a fully-funded International Researcher on Behaviour & Inclusion, as well as teaching for nearly 20 years. For her tips and resources check out her website above.
Whichever way you look at it behaviour of our pupils, is linked to our behaviour - and everyone's behaviour is linked to the wellbeing of an individual and a community...and whilst as educators we know this in theory, the how-to often stumps us. This guide - with 26 expert contributors, covers the wellbeing topic from every angle. Whilst I have experience of what wellbeing looks like in education from some perspectives, what I enjoyed about this book is that it invites me (in small easy, accessible chunks) to get to know about other areas where my blindspots come in.
Despite many school leaders and teaching and non-teaching staff working hard to support children's and their own wellbeing, more needs to be done. This book provides you with the necessary tools and strategies to navigate your way through the changing educational landscape and shape the schools of the future. Written by a diverse range of experts in the field, it explores how all school staff can support their own, their colleagues' and their students' wellbeing, how leaders can lead well and be well, and the importance of relationships within the entire school community…
Adele Bates is a Behaviour & Education Specialist who empowers school leaders and teachers to support pupils with behavioural needs and SEMH to thrive with their education. She’s an International Keynote Speaker, a featured expert on teenagers and behaviour for BBC Radio 4, the author of "Miss, I Don't Give A Sh*t", Engaging with Challenging Behaviour in Schools, from Sage & Corwin Press, and is a fully-funded International Researcher on Behaviour & Inclusion, as well as teaching for nearly 20 years. For her tips and resources check out her website above.
I began teaching when I was 13 years old. I ran a drama school for primary school-aged children (yep, type-A). From then on I was always teaching. As I continued, through my teens and into my twenties I thought it important to get some outside input and not just regurgitate my old teachers! Sue's books were one of the first I picked up.
With so few women's voices in places of influence when it comes to Behaviour in British Schools, it was a particularly poignant read for me. Its down-to-earth, on-the-ground perspective appealed hugely, as well as its practical help. As I mention in my book, it is still a resource I use to this day, and I have been honoured and thrilled to have Sue's support and endorsement for my own workaround behaviour.
Sue Cowley's bestselling behaviour guide. Essential reading for all teachers in all schools.
'Show the students the can of dog food, open it up and then eat from it. Offer it round the class to see if anyone else will have a taste...'*
This is just one of Sue Cowley's infamous ways of captivating your students, seizing control and getting that unruly class to behave! *(WARNING: Make sure you read the crucial preparation advice before putting this idea into practice!)
Now in its fifth edition, Getting the Buggers to Behave remains a firm favourite with trainees, newly qualified teachers and…
Adele Bates is a Behaviour & Education Specialist who empowers school leaders and teachers to support pupils with behavioural needs and SEMH to thrive with their education. She’s an International Keynote Speaker, a featured expert on teenagers and behaviour for BBC Radio 4, the author of "Miss, I Don't Give A Sh*t", Engaging with Challenging Behaviour in Schools, from Sage & Corwin Press, and is a fully-funded International Researcher on Behaviour & Inclusion, as well as teaching for nearly 20 years. For her tips and resources check out her website above.
The first poem in this book, from the perspective of a SEND pupil, is so moving. The concept - and reality - that a pupil with SEND is 7 times more likely to be excluded from mainstream school (according to The Timpson Report 2019), is horrific. This book opened my eyes further as to what we're getting wrong, and the huge overlap between my work with behaviour and SEND.
In Don't Send Him in Tomorrow, Jarlath O'Brien shines a light on the marginalised, disenfranchised and forgotten children of today's schools. The percentage of children achieving the government's expected standard in benchmark tests is national news every year. The progress that children with learning difficulties and SEN make is never discussed, because it is not understood. That is a problem. The bone-crushing infrastructure which professionals have to negotiate is a problem. The fact that so many parents have to fight tooth and nail so that the needs of their children are met, something the rest of us would consider a…
For almost 20 years, I worked in public and private schools, first teaching with the Peace Corps in Niger and finally in a public high school in New Jersey. For a while, I didn’t feel I knew how to teach. I struggled to reach American teens. I thought they had attitude—and were nasty and lazy. I didn’t want to be in the classroom. But then matters turned around and I began to see how I could make a difference in their lives, enjoying the time I spent with them, and shaping them into decent, hardworking types. And, in the process, they all learned some French—and respected me.
I understood that it’s okay to smile in class before Christmas, which holiday gifts teachers really want, and that faculty meetings can be long and dry in other schools. The book gave me insight into one person’s experiences in a school, which sometimes I related to and other times, I didn’t.
This hilarious and candid collection of personal essays about teaching follows in the footsteps of such classics as Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire, The Courage to Teach, and Up the Down Staircase. “Send this book to your favorite teacher. They’ll know you’re sucking up. They’ll thank you anyway” (People).
Shannon Reed did not want to be a teacher, but now, after twenty years of working with children from preschool to college, there’s nothing she’d rather be. “With an irresistible combination of compassion, humor, and engaged storytelling” (Shelf Awareness), her essays illuminate the highs and lows of a job located…
Three biographical facts that well equip me to write about both monsters and mental health: I am a psychologist who researches, writes, and teaches about emotions, learning, and quality of life. I am also someone who suffers from panic disorder. I am also someone who enjoys interacting with the world of the dark and spooky, in part to tame my internal fears. I think that many of us use fiction in general and horror in particular as a sandbox of sorts—a safe place where we can expose ourselves to our fears, to test out scenarios, and to explore hidden parts of our psyche.
Much of my book focuses on educational approaches to supporting youth mental health, and Hammond’s is one of my favorite books on how to construct a classroom that honors and celebrates all the diverse voices in the room, and how to do so through what she (and others) call being a “warm demander.”
The book is inspirational, important, and wise. I revisit it often.
A bold, brain-based teaching approach to culturally responsive instruction
The achievement gap remains a stubborn problem for educators of culturally and linguistically diverse students. With the introduction of the rigorous Common Core State Standards, diverse classrooms need a proven framework for optimizing student engagement and facilitating deeper learning
Culturally responsive pedagogy has shown great promise in meeting this need, but many educators still struggle with its implementation. In this book, Zaretta Hammond draws on cutting-edge neuroscience research to offer an innovative approach for designing and implementing brain-compatible culturally responsive instruction.
I love to teach and to do research on teaching and learning. Little compares to seeing how students’ faces light up when they get it. I want more students to experience the experience of getting it. After teaching for 25 years, and taking a deep dive into the scientific literature on learning, I have accumulated some important insights that I share in my work as Executive Director of a teaching and learning center, with my students, and with faculty across the nation. Teaching is not an impromptu act. It is an art and a science and I revel in it. These books will light a fire in you.
I love books with specific, pragmatic ways to change what I do in the classroom.
Every chapter of this book was packed with something I wanted to try. There are a lot of general suggestions floating around (e.g., more active learning), but what exactly does a teacher do?
This book is a great compliment to my book. The former gives students pragmatic tips, and this one is packed with examples for teachers.
Unleash powerful teaching and the science of learning in your classroom
Powerful Teaching: Unleash the Science of Learning empowers educators to harness rigorous research on how students learn and unleash it in their classrooms. In this book, cognitive scientist Pooja K. Agarwal, Ph.D., and veteran K-12 teacher Patrice M. Bain, Ed.S., decipher cognitive science research and illustrate ways to successfully apply the science of learning in classrooms settings. This practical resource is filled with evidence-based strategies that are easily implemented in less than a minute-without additional prepping, grading, or funding!
Research demonstrates that these powerful strategies raise student achievement by…
I’m an author, tech philosopher, father, geek, pianist, and novelist; and I'm fascinated by what it means to think clearly and well. Our world is bristling with complexities and crises; with staggering technologies, opportunities, and threats. What does it mean to find some kind of clarity, focus, and community amid this maelstrom? How can we hope to grasp, together, the nature of our times? These are the questions that keep me up at night—and that have driven me to write books that, I hope, can help and support people in rigorously exploring such questions for themselves.
This is a slim, passionate, personal book by one of the most significant American educators and activists of the last century. It’s part of her “teaching” trilogy (the other two books cover Community and Freedom) and is founded on the belief that “one could choose to educate for the practice of freedom.” Critical thinking is often treated as an emotionless, logical discipline, but this book shows how it’s rooted in a deep human longing for understanding—and is also vital to informed, equitable democratic participation. Teaching Critical Thinking is a profound testament to the significance of emotionally, politically, and intellectually engaged pedagogy – and why these three things are ultimately inseparable.
In Teaching Critical Thinking, renowned cultural critic and progressive educator bell hooks addresses some of the most compelling issues facing teachers in and out of the classroom today.
In a series of short, accessible, and enlightening essays, hooks explores the confounding and sometimes controversial topics that teachers and students have urged her to address since the publication of the previous best-selling volumes in her Teaching series, Teaching to Transgress and Teaching Community. The issues are varied and broad, from whether meaningful teaching can take place in a large classroom setting to confronting issues of self-esteem. One professor, for example, asked…
I’ve been meditating for thirty years, leading meditations with students for the last decade, and most recently working with teachers to explore how they can deepen the experiences of their students by engaging in their inner lives. This work, as well as my own experiences in the classroom as an educator, makes the topic ideal for me to explore and share more about.
This book seems to be even more relevant today after the recent passing of Thich Nhat Hanh. Hanh was truly a groundbreaking monastic and peace activist. He introduced mindfulness to the west as well as the concept of “engaged contemplation.” I think Hanh’s book, Happy Teachers is the ultimate toolkit for bringing these practices fully into the classroom. It is so much more than just mindfulness, but a new way of seeing one’s own teaching and practice.
Happy Teachers Change the World is the first official, authoritative manual of the Thich Nhat Hanh/Plum Village approach to mindfulness in education. Spanning the whole range of schools and grade levels, from preschool through higher education, these techniques are grounded in the everyday world of schools, colleges, and universities.
Beginning firmly with teachers and all those working with students, including administrators, counselors, and other personnel, the Plum Village approach stresses that educators must first establish their own mindfulness practice since everything they do in the classroom will be based on that foundation. The book includes easy-to-follow, step-by-step techniques perfected by…
I am passionate about the dissemination of economic ideas both inside and outside university spaces. In addition to classroom lectures at my university, I give a lot of public lectures on economics. Through these talks, I introduce the audience to the tradition of doing economics using a critical perspective. I have an MA and MPhil in Economics from the University of Hyderabad and a PhD in Economics from the University of Sydney.
I was introduced to bell hooks only later in my teaching career—after I had taught for 10 years.
And I read hooks immediately after reading Paulo Freire’sThe Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
This is a book on pedagogy, especially within a classroom with students from diverse social backgrounds. This is the book on critical pedagogy, I would say.
The training of economists will significantly benefit from engaging with the work of hooks.
"After reading Teaching to Transgress I am once again struck by bell hooks's never-ending, unquiet intellectual energy, an energy that makes her radical and loving." -- Paulo Freire
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 speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do…
