Book Table

Dr. Harvey Sumner has a dirty little secret. Although he’s a world renowned child psychologist with honors galore and the scion of a long line of child healers, he’s childless and hasn’t worked professionally with a single child for over thirty years.

The tension between his fame and the reality of his life finally reaches a breaking point when he’s kidnapped by the U.S. government and held in a bunker twelve floors below the National Institutes of Health. Here he learns of a covert government project to declare childhood as a medical disorder and eliminate it from the human genome in America.

Will Harvey manage to escape from his underground prison and save the country’s children and childhood itself? Or will America become a childless nation?

Read the novel and find out!

A new term has emerged from the disability movement in the past decade to help change the way we think about neurological disorders: Neurodiversity. The number of categories of illnesses listed by the American Psychiatric Association has tripled in the past fifty years. With so many people affected by our  growing “culture of disabilities,” it no longer makes sense to hold on to the deficit-ridden idea of  neuropsychological illness. With the sensibility of Oliver Sacks and Kay Redfield Jamison, psychologist Thomas Armstrong offers a revolutionary perspective that reframes many neuropsychological disorders as part of the natural diversity of the human brain rather than as definitive illnesses. The Power of Neurodiversity emphasizes their positive dimensions, showing how people with ADHD, bipolar disorder, and other conditions have inherent evolutionary advantages that, matched with the appropriate environment or ecological niche, can help them achieve dignity and wholeness in their lives.

A new concept on human diversity has emerged over the past 10 years that promises to revolutionize the way educators provide service to students with special needs:  neurodiversity.  Just as we celebrate diversity in nature and culture, so too do we need to honor the diversity of brains among our students who learn, think, and behave differently.  In this book, Thomas Armstrong argues that we should embrace the strengths of such neurodiverse students to help them and their neurotypical peers thrive in school and beyond.

For college level students and adults in the workplace, read my book The Power of Neurodiversity:  Unleashing the Advantages of Your Differently Wired Brain.

Moody. Reckless. Impractical. Insecure. Distracted. These are all words commonly used to describe adolescents.  But what if we recast these traits in a positive light?  Teens possess insight, passion, idealism, sensitivity, and creativity in abundance -- all qualities that can make a significant positive contribution to society.

In this thought-provoking book, Thomas Armstrong looks at the power and promise of the teenage brain from an empathetic, strength-based perspective—and describes what middle and high school educators can do to make the most of their students potential.

In today's schools, students and teachers feel unprecedented--even alarming--levels of stress.  How can we create calmer classrooms in which students concentrate better and feel more positive about themselves and others?  Author Thomas Armstrong offers a compelling answer in the form of mindfulness, a secular practice he defines as the intentional focus of one's attention on the present moment in a nonjudgmental way.

With nearly a half million copies of this book in print, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom provides a nuts-and-bolts teacher's guide to the theory of multiple intelligences, including chapters on lesson planning, teaching strategies, assessment, classroom management, identifying students' intelligences, and more. This fourth edition provides new chapters on personalized learning, neurodiversity, and new learning technologies, as well an appendix of lesson plans aligned to Common Core State Standards.

A fully revised and updated edition of the groundbreaking book on tackling the root causes of children’s attention and behavior problems rather than masking the symptoms with medication.

More than twenty years after Dr. Thomas Armstrong's Myth of the ADD Child first published, he presents much needed updates and insights in this substantially revised edition. When The Myth of the ADD Child was first published in 1995, Dr. Thomas Armstrong made the controversial argument that many behaviors labeled as ADD or ADHD are simply a child's active response to complex social, emotional, and educational influences. In this fully revised and updated edition, Dr. Armstrong shows readers how to address the underlying causes of a child's attention and behavior problems in order to help their children implement positive changes in their lives.

The rate of ADHD diagnosis has increased sharply, along with the prescription of medications to treat it. Now needed more than ever, this book includes fifty-one new non-drug strategies to help children overcome attention and behavior problems, as well as updates to the original fifty proven strategies.

Thomas Armstrong, Ph.D., an award-winning educator and expert on human development, offers a cross-cultural view of life's entire journey, from before birth to death to the possibilities of an afterlife. Dr. Armstrong cites both clinical research and anecdotal evidence in a comprehensive view of the challenges and opportunities we face at every stage of our development. His accessible narrative incorporates elements of history, literature, psychology, spirituality, and science in a fascinating guide to understanding our past as well as our future.

Being smart is more than getting good grades or passing tests in school.  It's more than reading well, solving math problems, memorizing facts, and having a high IQ.  Psychologist Dr. Howard Gardner studied how kids and adults learn.  He discovered many different ways people can be smart.  You can be Music Smart, People Smart, Body Smart, Logic Smart, Word Smart, Self Smart, Picture Smart, Nature Smart, and Life Smart.  Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has changed how teachers teach in schools around the world.  Now, kids can use the same approach to develop their own smarts!

Based on psychologist Howard Gardner's pioneering theory of "multiple intelligences," the original edition of 7 Kinds of Smart identified seven distinct ways of being smart, including "word smart," "music smart," "logic smart," and "people smart." Now, with the addition of two new kinds of smart--"naturalist" and "existential"--7 Kinds of Smart offers even more interesting information about how the human psyche functions. Complete with checklists for determining one's strongest and weakest intelligences, exercises, practical tips for developing each type of smart, a revised bibliography for further reading, and a guide to related Internet sites, this book continues to be an essential resource, offering cutting-edge research for general consumption.

Does your child have a favorite subject, activity, or hobby? Children learn in multiple ways, and educator Thomas Armstrong has shown hundreds of thousands of parents and teachers how to locate those unique areas in each of our children where learning and creativity seem to flow with special vigor.

In this fully updated classic on multiple intelligences, Armstrong sheds new light on the "eight ways to bloom," or the eight kinds of "multiple intelligences." While everyone possesses all eight intelligences, Armstrong delineates how to discover your child's particular areas of strength among them.

The book shatters the conventional wisdom that brands our students as "underachievers," "unmotivated," or as suffering from "learning disabilities," "attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," or other "learning diseases." Armstrong explains how these flawed labels often overlook students who are in possession of a distinctive combination of multiple intelligences, and demonstrates how to help them acquire knowledge and skills according to their sometimes extraordinary aptitudes.

Filled with resources for the home and classroom, this new edition of In Their Own Way offers inspiration for every learning situation.

During the last three decades, education reformers have pushed standardized testing and policies like No Child Left Behind and Common Core to improve test scores and proficiency in basic skills. However, during this period that author Thomas Armstrong calls the "miseducation of America," a number of troubling trends have surfaced, including a decrease in creative thinking scores among children in kindergarten through third grade.

Rather than focus on what's wrong with the education system that has produced these outcomes, Armstrong lays out what creative thinkers know about how children should be educated. In an extended thought experiment, he asks what would happen if we turned the reins of educational policy over, not to the politicians and educational bureaucrats, but to eminent thinkers and creators like Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Martin Luther King Jr., Rachel Carson, Doris Lessing, Jane Goodall, and other seminal culture-builders. What might they say about the best way to educate a child? If Einstein Ran the Schools suggests that the answers to this intriguing question should guide future efforts to reform our nation's schools.