5 Books That Every International Educator Should Read

“Adding quality vocabulary instruction practices to your role as an educator can help you identify when a student of yours is quite literally lost in translation”

You’re probably used to assigning books to your students, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some valuable books that can help you be a better educator. The following list of books is intended to broaden your perspective as an international educator so you can be as effective as possible in your classroom of diverse students. Being open to various concepts of thinking and logic will benefit everyone under your instruction.

The Daily Stoic

This book will be a tool for you as an educator. The concept of stoicism can challenge and help you reflect on your own personal ethics. In diverse classes, you may need assistance finding your own clarity in your role based on how your students interact and react to you.

Your students can benefit from your engagement with stoicism because you’ll be able to isolate incidents that occur in the classroom. The reflection you experience can keep you centred and from acting irrationally in a given moment when you’re faced with something challenging.

Logic of Scientific Discovery

In 1959, philosopher Karl Popper wrote about the concept of falsifiability in science. Basically, he wrote about how it only takes one repeatable experiment to disprove a theory and no number of experiments to solidifying a theory is true. In fact, positive experiment results only verify a theory still holds some truth. When it comes to international education, there are many stereotypes around academics and relationships in different cultures.

Some international students may find it difficult to navigate a new culture, Popper’s ideas of logic in science can be applied. For example, one class may be difficult, but that doesn’t mean a student is a bad student. In a relationship context, if someone does a favour, that doesn’t mean they will do a favour every time they are asked or that another person will complete a favour when asked. Popper’s ideology can bring some perspective and keep students from formulating their own behavioural rules based on one incident.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman unveils the intricacies of System 1 and System 2 thinking in this book. He dives into how decisions are made based on either system of thinking, and this knowledge can help us apply the proper methods for making the best choices.

As international students are engaging in a new society, educators can offer assistance to make the transition easier on them. Being able to talk with a student about how another system of thinking can be applied to make their time run more smoothly can be a huge benefit to the relationship between educator and student.

Teaching Outside the Box: How to Grab Their Students by Their Brains

If you flip over and read the back cover of this book, you’ll find that it includes tips to “create welcoming classrooms for learnings to thrive.” When international students are being welcomed to a new country, you should do what you can to at least make sure they feel welcome in your classroom too.

This book provides additional ideas for managing behaviours in your classroom – irrespective of whether you’re teaching humanities or STEM – and creating lessons that allow students with higher intelligence to benefit from them. As an educator, this book is your tool to great classroom management that doesn’t hinder or hurt any of your students regardless of where they are from.

Bringing Words to Life

Learning a new culture typically comes with learning a new language. While international students may have a fantastic vocabulary in their native language, they may struggle with recognizing, translating, and understanding their counterparts.

Adding quality vocabulary instruction practices to your role as an educator can help you identify when a student of yours is quite literally lost in translation. Depending on the subject you teach, non-native and native speakers alike can probably benefit from the methods introduced in this book.

About the author: Jason Patel is the founder of Transizion, a college counseling and career services company that provides boot camps and tutoring on college applications, college essays, career development, and finding the right job or internship.