Books
Some of the most important thinking on education reform, student engagement and what schooling could be has been written in long form.
This collection brings together books for parents, teachers, researchers and policymakers who want to go deeper — selected for their relevance to the middle years and their capacity to move thinking forward.
The Children We Leave Behind: How School Could Be Done Differently
- Geoff Masters
- 2026
Ask a teacher why some students disengage in the middle years and you will hear many answers: family circumstances, social media, a lack of motivation, the challenges of adolescence. What you will hear less often is this: the school system itself is built in a way that makes disengagement almost inevitable for a large proportion of students. That is the central argument of Geoff Masters' important book.
The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better
- Jenny Anderson & Rebecca Winthrop
- 2025
Adolescents are hardwired to learn. So why do so many of them stop? That's the question journalist Jenny Anderson and Brookings Institution education expert Rebecca Winthrop spent five years investigating — and the answer, they found, is more nuanced than most parents or teachers realise.
Learners Without Borders
- Yong Zhao
- 2022
Decades of education reform have changed curricula, tweaked assessments, tinkered with teaching and held principals accountable. The one thing they have never done is treat students as active partners in the process. Yong Zhao argues this is precisely why reform has failed.
The New Meaning of Educational Change
- Michael Fullan
- 2016
Education reform has a long history of bold intentions and disappointing results. Michael Fullan has spent more than four decades trying to understand why — and what it actually takes to make change stick.
Cultivating Cultures of Thinking in Australian Schools
- Cameron Paterson & Simon Brooks
- 2025
Most classrooms are built around control — control of content, pace, questions and outcomes. This book makes the case that genuine learning begins when that control is loosened. Grounded in Dr Ron Ritchhart's Cultures of Thinking approach from Harvard's Project Zero, it brings together Australian educators to show what teaching for deep engagement actually looks like in practice.
Blueprint for Tomorrow: Redesigning Schools for Student-Centered Learning
- Prakash Nair
- 2014
Most school buildings were designed for a different era — one that valued compliance over curiosity, and efficient content delivery over genuine learning. In Blueprint for Tomorrow, award-winning school designer Prakash Nair makes a compelling case that the physical environment is not a neutral backdrop to education; it actively shapes what is possible inside it.