Teacher Summer 2022 Reading

There's no reading quite like summer reading. There's just something about the longer days, warmer temperatures, and natural laziness to a summer day that makes you sink into a book a little differently than you do at other times of the year.

If you're looking for a good teacher title to add to your stack this summer, here are a few that I recommend:

• Reading Reconsidered by Colleen Driggs, Doug Lemov, and Erica Woolway. This is a research- and evidence-based collection of best practices in literacy instruction that are actionable and timely. I turn to this often.
• Transformational Literacy by Ron Berger, Libby Woodfin, Suzanne Nathan Plaut, and Cheryl Becker Dobbertin. Ron Berger leads the vision for teaching and learning at EL Education and is a former Harvard Graduate School of Education professor. This book will help you understand more deeply the philosophy and instructional rationale behind our curriculum.
• Teach Like a Champion by Doug Lemov. If you're looking for a refresher on solid, easy to replicate classroom practices, this is the book for you.
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren. This book has been in print for over 80 years, and folks in reading circles still refer to it (including my beloved Tim Shanahan).
• The Writing Revolution by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler. This is great for getting to the nuts and bolts of writing with easy-to-implement practices.
• The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Minds Reads by Daniel Willingham. I'm excited to dig into this one as I think about our move away from thinking of reading as a set of skills and toward how we teach kids to tackle and unpack complex texts.
• Total Participation Techniques by Himmele and Himmele. This will be a focus area of mine next year, and this is the book I'll be turning to.
• Checking for Understanding by Fisher and Frey. This is going to be another focus area for me for next year, and this is on my TBR list for the summer.
• The Teacher Wars by Dana Goldstein. I really think every teacher should read this book. Whether you're interested in education policy or not, this well-told history of the teaching profession will help you understand how the challenges we face today came to be.

So grab a lawn chair, a Sonic drink, and a stack of books. Summer's almost here.

Here's to simply teaching well,