Best 5 books I read in 2023

2023年にめぐり合った本について振り返ると、「当たり年」でそれらの本から多くのことを学びたくさんの視点を得ました。私のBest5冊を紹介します。

Ron Ritchhart (2020) The Power of Making Thinking Visible 
“Teaching is not telling, and the delivery of content at a preprogrammed pace does not engender deep learning. Learning happens when students engage with ideas, when they ask questions, explore, and construct meaning with our guidance and support. Therefore, we need to make thinking visible because it provides us with the information we need to plan opportunities that will take students' learning to the next level and enable continued engagement with the ideas being explored. It is only when we understand what our students are thinking, feeling, and attending to that we can use that knowledge to further engage and support them in the process of understanding. Thus, making students' thinking visible becomes an ongoing component of effective, responsive teaching.” 

Tina Seelig (2015) Inside Out 
“The following letter to parents came with boxes of Legos back in 1974. This note recently went viral on social media as people remembered the days when this toy wasn’t sold with “one right answer”: To Parents: The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls. It’s imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship. A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses. The most important thing is to put the right material in their hands and let them create whatever appeals to them.” 

Tina Seelig (2019) What I wish I knew when I was 20 
“In fact, real life is the ultimate open-book exam. The doors are thrown wide open, allowing everyone to draw on endless resources around them as they tackle open-ended problems related to work, family, friends, and the world at large.” 

Warren Berger (2018) The Book of Beautiful Questions 
“Having strong questioning skills has always been important. But in a time of exponential change, it’s a twenty-first-century survival skill. From an individual career standpoint, continued success will depend on having the ability to keep learning while updating and adapting what we already know. We must continually invent or reinvent the work we do every day. None of this is possible without constant questioning.” 

David Epstein (2019) Range
“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivises, even demands, hyperspecialisation.”

「私たちすべてが直面している課題は、過度の専門分化をさらに奨励し、要求さえする世界において、幅の広さ、多様な経験、異分野間の思考、ひとつのことに集中することを遅らせるという利点をいかに維持するかということです。」

2024年も ”Learn, unlearn and relearn” の学習サイクルを続けていく中で、Epsteinが述べているような幅や多様性を豊かに持ち続けることを意識していきたいと思います。