Our list spans the genres — from a fluffy romance, to a spine-tingling thriller, to a few that focus on your personal growth. With spring break upon us, a great read can serve as a gentle reminder to reflect on our work, and consider new ways to grow going forward. Cozy up within view of the spring blossoms and dig into one of these great reads.
1. The Visionary: Schools Reimagined
The disruption of COVID-19 has been fraught with complications to say the least, but it also has opened up an opportunity for teachers to do what they do best — problem solving on a daily basis for individual learners. Pulling from research around pedagogy, psychology, and design thinking, this recent publication challenges educators to reimagine school by focusing on the academic and SEL growth of students and their teachers.
2. The Awestruck: The Disordered Cosmos
In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has done more to popularize astrophysics than anything has since A Brief History of Time. Her brilliant work manages to weave together some grand theories and existential philosophies with current events and human biology. This accessible read has us all looking upward a bit more often, wondering a bit more deeply, and remembering to have a bit of perspective on things.
3. The Civic: Rationality
Pinker is, to many, one of the world’s greatest thinkers. Recently, his works have taken on an optimism that couldn’t be better timed. His last book taught us that, despite what we’re hearing, humanity is on an upward trajectory in almost every category. In Rationality, Pinker reminds us to reject the idea that human beings are inherently irrational. If we can only leverage the tools we’ve built over millennia (think critical thinking, logic, etc.), we’ll continue our upward trajectory.
4. The Vulnerable: Atlas of the Heart
Brown has made a living inspiring us to be vulnerable, to go out on a limb, and to expose our real selves to our world as a means to discover, improve, and grow as people. Her special interest (and growing fanbase) among teachers really comes through in her new book, Atlas of the Heart, where she puts all self-help books to shame with down-to-earth and actionable ideas about the human condition wrapped in adventure.
5. The Mindful: Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons from the Science of Learning
Lang shares some timely techniques for making small changes in a single class period to make a long and lasting difference in students’ learning processes. He provides activities, interventions, and modifications designed to support the latest in cognitive research. The concrete examples provide a model for you to try and tweak for your own classroom.