What an educational psychology textbook ought to be: lean, focused, and with clear lines drawn between insights of cognitive science and instructional practices. It also does a good job of cutting through some of the faddish jargon that educational literature is prone to run off with before the science is well understood. See http://www.tantor.com/Extras/B0419_WhyStudents/B0419_WhyStudents_PDF_1.pdf for the book's figures, especially #21, which lays out the book's nine core principles.

I started this book awhile ago and didn’t finish so I reread it. There was a lot in there to help me as a teacher and and my work to help others teach better. I expect I will want to read it every few years and pull new information out of it. The thing that stuck out to be this time was the information on how to work with other teachers to improve both people’s teaching. I think we have been doing it wrong. The trust must be built first and then the teacher has to be looking for ideas.

If you work with students in any capacity, this book is a fantastic resource to understand the ins and outs of student learning. Willingham makes it an easy and interesting read.

Reads a bit like a series of Willingham's "Ask the Cognitive Science" columns, but they're generally so good that it's worth persisting. A series of findings more than a framework for education, I now look forward to reading Wilingham's "When can you trust the experts?" which DOES provide a heuristic for making sense of research in education. Still, this book is worth discussion amongst scholars and teachers if only because it nudges back against intuitive truisms like 'the best way to learn science is to do science' (maybe, once students have sufficient knowledge to operate within scientific discourse).

DNF. Skimming sections to apply to work. Read the whole conclusion. TL;DR school has to be interesting, hard but not too hard, and be useful.

I took my time reading this book, because I wanted to absorb to the best of my ability all of the cognitive principles provided by the author.

I recommend it to all K-12 teachers. And this will be one of those rare pedagogy books that I revisit every year or two. I am prepared today to act on some of these principles. But I expect that when I reread this book in a year or two, I will be better prepared to enact other principles.