The Ingredients for Great Teaching

If you’re seeking to improve your knowledge of education research but unsure where to start, you won’t find a better gateway book than this. Its insights are scholarly enough to inspire future study, yet practical enough to be applied in first period tomorrow.

Pedro De Bruyckere helped to reveal the lack of evidence behind many intuitively appealing ideas within teaching in his previous book. In Ingredients for Great Teaching he takes the next logical step – pointing teachers towards the more reliable evidence about teaching and learning they can use in the classroom. This excellent and accessible book represents an important contribution to one of the major foundations of professionalism in teaching; expertly describing the evidence-informed, scientific insights that teachers can use to make deliberate choices for the benefit of their pupils and students.

The last few years have seen a number of excellent books about how recent research, particularly from psychology, can be used to improve teaching, but Pedro De Bruyckere’s The Ingredients for Great Teaching is one of the best of the crop.  In a highly readable and engaging style, he sifts through recent educational research, and helps the reader figure out which research studies can be relied on, which need to be taken with a grain of salt, and which need to be ignored completely. Anyone involved in teaching will gain a tremendous amount by reading this book. Highly recommended.