Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery by Kathleen Cushman


Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery
Title : Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0470646039
ISBN-10 : 9780470646038
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 208
Publication : First published January 1, 2010

Through the voices of students themselves, Fires in the Mind brings a game-changing question to teachers of adolescents: What does it take to get really good at something? Starting with what they already know and do well, teenagers from widely diverse backgrounds join a cutting-edge dialogue with adults about the development of mastery in and out of school. Their insights frame motivation, practice, and academic challenge in a new light that galvanizes more powerful learning for all. To put these students' ideas into practice, the book also includes practical tips for educators. Breaks new ground by bringing youth voices to a timely topic-motivation and mastery Includes worksheets, tips, and discussion guides that help put the book's ideas into practice Author has 18 previous books on adolescent learning and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Educational Leadership, and American Educator

From the author of Fires in the Bathroom, this is the next-step book that pushes the conversation to next level, as teenagers tackle the pressing challenges of motivation and mastery.


Fires in the Mind: What Kids Can Tell Us About Motivation and Mastery Reviews


  • Megan

    Kathleen Cushman worked with over 160 students to figure out what it takes to be really good at something. The book is a must read for all educators and administrators since it gives a first hand look into what students think about learning, motivation, and mastery. Some key criteria the students came up with were:

    1. Link school to a purpose that has meaning to us.
    2. Keep the community of learners small enough to know each other.
    3. Make exploring new fields a big part of our learning.
    4. Don't try to cover everything.
    5. Organize learning around themes and projects.
    6. Model collaboration among adults.
    7. Connect us with experts in the community.
    8. Provide opportunities for us to develop initiative and leadership.
    9. Give us choices about how to learn important subjects.
    10. Make performance a part of learning.
    11. Do away with class rankings.
    12. Listen to the perspectives of others, including youth.

    If you are looking for a book that is inspiring and motivating about education, this is the one. This is educational reform within the four walls of your classroom!

  • Zac Chase

    This has been a summer of attempting to get through many of those books which have lived on the shelves of three different houses now without actually having, you know, been read.
    Aside from the weak-willed ordering of still more books from Amazon and picking up a few the other day at the local privately-owned book store, I'm making progress.

    Today, I finished Kathleen Cushman's Fires in the Mind. It earned two stars from me on GoodReads.com, but I wanted to want to award it much more.
    Cushman and her teenage collaborators take as their focus of investigation the idea of expertise and how a person becomes an expert. As they work through these ideas in the first few chapters, they turn their attention to schools and what formal education systems can do to encourage the same kinds of mind fires as students' outside interests as discussed in the first half of the book.
    From just this premise, I was hopeful. It's a topic that has the potential to illuminate faculty meetings, and pre-service teacher classrooms everywhere. What are we doing in education if not working to encourage students' curiosity and ability to work toward expertise?

    The book falls short in a few ways.

    First, Cushman laces the text with quotations from her "collaborators" throughout. These were teenagers who participated in the Practice Project as an attempt to answer the questions mentioned above. The quotations made the reading choppy and I found myself working to hold on to a singular narrative voice. While appreciating the inclusion of direct ideas from students, I often found myself wishing they had written the book outright alongside Cushman rather than Cushman trying to put their words where she felt they belonged.

    Similar to this, the student quotations are apparently taken verbatim from student interviews. As such, they include the odd error in traditional grammar. I suppose this is an attempt to validate the approach and show that these are regular kids offering up their ideas in their own voices. I celebrate that idea. At the same time, should Cushman have faltered from Standard Formal English, her editor would surely have dinged her on the mistake.

    If we are talking about kids becoming authentic collaborators, it feels wrong to lower the bar for how their words are presented.

    The other fault I found as I was reading was the lack of direct references to others who have walked this way before and done the work of research expertise and engagement. Perhaps this was done so as not to crowd out the students' voices. For me, though, it ended up taking the legs out from under the text. I would be far more likely to recommend this book to others if the student researchers' findings sat alongside and made reference to the others in the field doing this work. At the back of the book, Cushman acknowledges that the work of the Practice Project was informed by the writings and research of many others and lists those texts, writing that she was glad the students were able to read the other authors' work.

    By hiding this until some curious reader tries to figure out what's happening, the book creates a sort of fence around the students' work that keeps it in a different arena than the experts. This keeps them as "student experts" rather than full-fledged "experts" and the separation was a perpetual frustration for me.

    If you are going to pick up this book, and I'm sure there are those who would benefit from its reading, start in the middle. This is where the text starts to wrap the students' findings around the everyday work of schools. Each chapter in the concluding half included passages that sought to provide concrete suggestions for making homework worthwhile, creating engaging projects, etc. I almost missed this when I considered putting the book down and walking away early on.

    As I was reading Fires in the Mind, I was hesitant to acknowledge my criticisms of the text. I finally came to terms with the fact that criticizing the book was not the same as criticizing the important work and her collaborators engaged in throughout the Practice Project.
    The project sounds as though it was worthwhile, informative and engaging for students. The retelling of the project, however, left me wanting more.

  • Shaeley Santiago

    Interesting book about how to get really good at something. The project follows actual high school students as they first explore something they are especially good at, and then interview other "experts" to discover common themes of what it takes to get really good. Students apply what they've learned to a school setting, giving suggestions and ideas to teachers about how to design homework/assignments to capture students' interest and motivation.

  • Alvaro Monzon

    Fires in the Mind by Kathleen Cushman
    Reviewed by Alvaro Monzon

    My star rating for this book is going to be three stars. I feel like at first it was a really good book because it seemed very interesting how a lot of kids were talking and giving their opinions and supporting everything that the author was saying, but the thing that I didn’t like is that all the book is about the kids talking and saying a lot of things and the author just gives kind of an introduction to what the kid is going to say most of the times. Then for me everything seemed very repetitive because he gives like a very big and complete summary about all the things that he is going to talk about. So when I read it in the chapter that the topic is in I would get bored because I kind of already knew what was all about.

    This book relates a lot to my hero’s journey because the majority of the things that they talk about in the book are things that I have experienced or can do to get better at doing some things. Since mostly all of the book is about improving and getting better in what you like I think that it is something that everyone can relate to because it can sometimes get really hard to keep going and so you just give up. While I was reading some things I also started thinking about some of my fellow eagles because I know that they have gone through that stage.

    I would recommend this book to people that really want to get better at what they do/job/passion/ what they like to do. In the book there are a lot of experiences from kids and youth that at least I could really relate to a lot. It is more for people that want to hear from other people and their experiences and learn from them and what they have to say.

    My favorite quote of the book was in the chapter two when Kathleen says:”As these young people describe how they found their compelling interests, they are reminding us that fun ---especially when it involves challenge and companionship--- is an essential element that propels learning.” I like this quote because I also think a lot about how everything that you do should involve having fun. If it is not that fun, then you have to make it fun because for me that is an easier and better way to learn things and keep advancing in what you are doing.

    My favorite chapter was the chapter three because that is where the part that is called “It’s worth the trouble” is. I really liked this part because it is in what I could mostly relate and it is something that I still can’t do very well. That is, keep doing things after something that happens disappoints you and you don’t want to continue anymore. It always happens to me that I am doing something and then either I get bored or I hear that it is not worth doing it or that it is really hard. But that only happens to me when it is about something that I am not completely interested about. But hearing/reading the kids experiences makes it feel like it is not that hard and that you should keep trying.

  • Claudia

    Read this for an online book club, but now I've forgotten which one...but I appreciated the premise of this book: ask kids! Trust them to know what works and what doesn't. This is a book about becoming an expert. What does that look like, feel like? Who know how to do it? What do you have to do? Cushman introduces the concept I first read in Malcolm Gladwell's OUTLIERS, the idea of 10,000 hours of practice is the only way to become an expert. But it's not mindless practice...it's focused, deliberate.

    I see many ideas I can take into the classroom as we talk about reading and how to become an expert reader. I think the idea of 10,000 hours puts it into perspective...do the work! Care enough to do the work well, to be honest about what you need to practice.

    The website is very helpful as well. Especially since I read the book on my kindle, I needed to see some of the worksheets, and print them out for myself.

    I felt like the book was padded with student quotes, many of which I skipped over as I was trying to find her thesis. Then I realized she also wrote FIRES IN THE BATHROOM. She did the same thing there: Great, original ideas between lots of kids' voices. The ideas are what sold me on the book, not the kids. BUt perhaps others needed this.

    NOW if I can just remember what group was going to discuss this and when that was going to happen.

  • Ahmad A M

    I liked it for the insights into effective learning presented from the students' point of view. I managed to find new ideas and rediscover nuggets of information that can probably help me frame my teaching (and students' learning) better and more effectively. The relevant checklists and questionnaires are pretty helpful. Overall I found her book easy to read although a bit repetitive at times (e.g. when she has a quote of the student raising a point and then touch on it again without much to add in her own body of text later on). I found the case studies at the end of the book a little unsatisfying. I would have liked to know a little more about how/if the objectives of the projects have been met (maybe contrasted with how different the results may have been otherwise). This book is definitely worth a read!

  • Jimmy

    This book is the result of Ms. Cushman's students study of what makes an expert.

    Experts ask good questions, break problems into parts, rely on evidence, look for patterns, consider other perspectives, follow hunches, use familiar ideas in new ways, collaborate, welcome critique, revise repeatedly, persist, seek out new challenges, and know their own best work styles.

    Practice has an express purpose, demands attention and focus, involves conscious repetition or
    rehearsal, is geared to the individual, takes careful timing, is not inherently enjoyable, develops new skills and knowledge, and applies to new endeavors.

    Easy book to skim through without reading. A book all teachers should read.

  • Suzy

    LIke other readers, I wanted to give this book a higher rating but in the end it just didn't live up to its potential. It did give me a lot to think about in terms of engaging kids in class, as feeling a connection with one's teacher was repeated over and over again as an aid in motivating students. In the end, the "practical" suggestions the author and her collaborators offered were not always terribly realistic.

  • Lynette

    This book was okay. I liked the student participation in the book but I didn't learn anything that was earth shattering or new. I guess because I counsel kids, I did not find any material surprising. I do like that we are moving away from success and motivation only being measured in superficial external entities. I like that we are now looking internally at what motivates young people. The changing measures of mastery are interesting as well.

  • Christopher Bergeron

    Lunchtime Book Discussion in the Library being lead by Linda @ the SAU. Open to students and staff. The book discussion was successful but the book was less than I had hoped. With the endless quotations it reminded me of when I was learning to drive a standard and was bucking the car. The book was significantly better either reading just the quotes or just the author's txt.

  • Becky

    nothing in this book is what you'd call earth shattering. common sense, really. the only interesting things is that high school students are the ones drawing some of the conclusions. I've read her other books- Fires in the Bathroom and Fires in the Middle School Bathroom, and those are also unsurprising common sense texts about teaching and education. those were slightly better, though.

  • Diane Cotton

    Interesting perspective.

  • Lydia

    I really liked the section about practice. It offers insights that definitely could be applied within the classroom.

  • Gaby Richard-harrington

    I found this book very helpful. I met Kathleen Cushman at one of her book talks at Teachers College in April 2011. Meeting her and discussing some of her ideas was fantastic!

  • Katie Dicesare

    Loving this book

  • Erica

    I'm excited to apply the, sometimes, common-sense ideas about motivation and excellence in my classroom this year.

  • Teresa Bunner

    Pair this with Daniel Pink's Drive and educators should have a lot to think about when it comes to motivation!

  • Jennifer

    Great book about what motivates kids to learn and how to invest them in the process.

  • Kim

    Cushman interviews students to find out what they can share about their motivation and desire to work when things are "hard." Excellent!

  • Sara

    I found some of the grey tabs and pages to be just as if not more helpful than the student's advice. I don't want to read every respondent's comments- I want the synthesis of it.

  • Mitzi Moore

    My favorite chapter was the one about homework. Thanks to my former students for contributing to this book!

  • Rachel

    eh. Boring. Vignette after vignette about the same thing: what got the kid interested in something. In no way revelatory.

  • Esther Valencia

    The book was easy to read, but there was too much quoting of student comments. I got the gist within the first few chapters.

  • Tim Kruse

    Kind of an odd collection of qualitative evidence about motivation and motivation theory. Overall it is alright.