The Math Education Books I Highly Recommend

I’ve been asked what books I recommend to someone to learn more and develop their professional learning around mathematics. In today’s vlog I will talk about books that I highly recommend in our quest to build our math minds, so we can build the math minds of our students.

When I was thinking about doing this vlog, I thought about if I should talk about the older books that have had such a profound impact on my teaching and my understanding of how kids learn math or should I go with some new books that have fresh and great ideas as well. However, when I really started to think about it, it’s not about what I need or what I want, it’s about what you need.

So, watch the video below or read the transcript.

If you are a math specialist or math coach in your district and are planning for a book study after the holiday break for the teachers you work with, then it’s not about what you want them to learn. It’s about what they need to learn and what they want to learn. If they are excited to learn about it, if you’re excited about learning about it, then you’re going to love it. So, it’s not what I love, it’s what you are wanting and needing right now.

It is the holiday break right now. This is going to be a short vlog because I have tons of books I could recommend but I’m not going to talk about every single one of them. Instead, I’m going to encourage you to get the download. I’ve broken it into two categories. Now, this is not an exhaustive list of what you could potentially read. it’s just some of my favorites from my own bookshelf that I think are great and I’ve divided them into two categories.

The first category is more theory and best practices of teaching mathematics. The other category is a more practical application. At times, they are very intermixed. There might be a book that is really theory based but intersperses things that are practical ideas you can use. Then there are others that are more focused on giving you practical things to try out in your classroom, with the theory intermixed.

So, it’s not a perfect divide and some of them fit into both categories but I tried to give you ones that I felt like have more theory based and you can have discussions about what you’re going to be trying, versus ones that are theory based but have a lot more of that, “okay, here’s an activity, try this, here’s ways that you can implement it in your classroom”, kind of books. So that’s what they’re divided into. I hope you will find some wonderful books to help build your math mind as you’re working to build the math minds of your students. Get the download of my recommended books below.