📘 Books That Stick: The Extended Mind in Action

A look at how thinking doesn’t just happen in the brain and why understanding this matters for how we design learning in schools.

❓ What’s It All About?

The Extended Mind emphasises that thinking doesn’t just happen inside our heads. Annie Murphy Paul’s research shows how cognition is extended and shaped by our bodies, our surroundings, and our interactions with others. Drawing from research into embodied, situated, and distributed cognition, she argues that tools like gestures, movement, collaboration, and even classroom spaces are not just extras; they’re fundamental to how we think and learn. Her work has directly influenced educators like Emma Turner, Oliver Caviglioli, and David Goodwin, who, in the book, build on these ideas to create a classroom-focused book that translates the theory into powerful, practical teaching approaches and techniques. Their work brings Annie’s research to life in schools, showing how teachers can design environments and tasks that extend thinking.

👀 Why I Picked It Up

I’ve been writing a lot recently about task design and learning models, and one thing many models overlook is the role of the environment in supporting working memory. This book puts that front and centre. It helped me make clearer connections between research and what great primary teachers have always known: that gestures, manipulatives, classroom layouts, and peer interaction aren’t extras to make things ‘fun’, they’re tools for thinking.

💡 What Stuck With Me

🙌 The role of gesture in supporting working memory: a powerful but often underused tool in classroom explanations.

🧩 The way manipulatives and the physical environment act as extensions of children’s thought processes.

🗣️ The concept of distributed cognition and how talking, listening, and collaborating with others helps us think better. It isn’t just ‘engagement’.

🎯 Who Should Give It a Go

This is a great read for teachers and leaders who want to stretch their understanding of learning beyond the usual models. It’s especially useful if you’re interested in task design, classroom environments, or how to support working memory in real-world settings. I think it speaks to the primary teacher who knows how valuable the external environment is to learning, but might not know why.

📗 Fancy Grabbing a Copy?

📝 More Book Recommendations

The Ultimate List of Books for Research-Informed Teachers - Looking for more book recommendations? I have you covered in my Ultimate List of Ed. Literature!

In a bit,
Coops 😎