A curated review of ESA publications for teaching ecology

Abstract Since the early 1990s, the Ecological Society of America's journals have published hundreds of articles of direct relevance to those who teach ecology—especially at the undergraduate level. In an effort to draw attention to that literature, we conducted an analysis to identify well‐cited articles, as well as those that may be underrecognized but still of value to anyone who teaches ecology. Eleven articles were selected from a bibliography of 440 articles ranked according to the number of Google Scholar citations and—where available—downloads, Mendeley reads, and Attention Score. A second list of 21 articles that we believe hold special value for ecology educators, but have lower metrics, was then identified. In this essay, we identify those articles and provide a synopsis of each one. Our intent is to inform ecology educators of an important source of insight and motivation, open a discussion about the ESA's education literature, and spur the further development of the next generation of outstanding education‐related articles.