With the mention of The First Days of School by Harry Wong in the other thread, I thought we should talk about some other books we've read on education, instruction, classroom management, etc. For a really good look at standardized testing, I recommend Susan Ohanian's book One Size Fits Few: The Folly of Educational Standards. I don't know about getting rid of standards completely... but I don't think deciding what kids should know at certain points is in their best interest. One of the better textbooks I had was Kelvin Seifert's Constructing a Psychology of Teaching and Learning. When I do lesson planning, I pretty much use the backwards design methods described in Understanding by Design by Wiggins and McTighe. That's enough for right now.
I'm listening to Lies My Teacher Told Me (a gift for father's day) on cd while I commute. I'm only on chapter 2, but so far it's interesting and it's written from a pedagogical perspective so teachers should be able to get something out of it. Basically, it's an indictment of the lack of critical analysis in the way history textbooks are written. However, I strongly recommend reading rather than listening to this book. The reader has an annoying voice to begin with and to make matters worse seems to have worshiped at the altar of Christopher Walken, Our Lord of Strange Inflection and Random Pauses. Okay for a sinister character in a movie, not so good for historical description.
My experience of this book is that a little bit goes a long way. I read it probably 10 years ago, so my memory of it isn't exactly fresh, but I remember the latter chapters just being more of the same. Which isn't to discount his point that history textbooks, on both the secondary and college level, are pretty abysmal. I'm not sure that its because they have a glossed over view of American history. I find even textbooks written by great historians like Alan Brinkley and Johnny Faragher almost unreadable for more than a few pages. And I know students feel the same way. I think the lack of depth and the lack of a coherent narrative rather than the ideological project (at least in university textbooks, I haven't seen a secondary textbook in years) is the main problem and I don't know if there's any way to solve that problem in a textbook.
Ooo... good one. Many people don't realize just how history works. I also teach a sunday school class at a synagogue about history. I downloaded those images of Christopher Columbus (and many, many others). It's so funny to hear their responses to who is pictures in all of the paintings. Heh... of course, I'm just realizing you didn't see the pics of Columbus in your audio book. Duh. Basically, I don't remember if they go into it, but there were never any portraits of Columbus made when he was alive. The number of portraits depicting completely different looking people is amazing. The fact that the history that I teach is completely left out of the textbooks shows how things are. I realize, of course, that you can't cover every perspective in the books... but some additional would be nice. Oh... and as far as poor readers. It's amazing how a bad reader can make a book unbearable. Right now, I'm listening to David Sedaris read War and Peace. I just don't know if he was the right choice. <- joke.
There are also some interesting journals on pedagogy. NJCU publishes one called Transformations, for which I just finished a peer review. Not available online, unfortunately. As important as how secondary history textbooks are written is how they are selected for adoption by school boards. Many years ago a prof of mine who cowrote a secondary text called America's Past (still in print, methinks) spent an entire clas period discussing his visits to school boards concerned with this or that interpretation, and how that played into the editing process.