5 Books to Add to Your Winter Reading List
Check out these principal-recommended books to curl up with over the holidays.
Communicator
December 2019, Volume 43, Issue 4
Are you looking for some principal-recommended books to curl up with over the holiday break? We’ve asked our members to offer up their picks so you can add them to your winter reading list.
Lead With Literacy: A Pirate Leader’s Guide to Developing a Culture of Readers by Mandy Ellis: Educator and elementary school principal Ellis offers practical, immediately actionable, fun ideas, and strategies that will deeply embed books, reading, and literacy into your school culture. Rather than focusing exclusively on Lexile scores and reading levels, Ellis encourages leaders to integrate literacy everywhere. The ultimate goal is to make reading a joy for every member of the school community—starting with the lead reader.
Culturize: Every Student. Every Day. Whatever It Takes. by Jimmy Casas: Author and education leader Casas shares insights into what it takes to cultivate a community of learners who embody the innately human traits our world desperately needs, such as kindness, honesty, and compassion. His stories reveal how these soft skills can be honed while meeting and exceeding academic standards of 21st-century learning.
Personalized Professional Learning: A Job-Embedded Pathway for Elevating Teacher Voice by Allison Rodman: This book is a step-by-step guide for diagnosing, planning, executing, evaluating, and refining teachers’ professional learning. Supported by research and informed by the experiences of educators across the U.S., it distills best practices for adult learning into clear advice and ready-to-use tools.
Schools that Succeed: How Educators Marshal the Power of Systems for Improvement by Karin Chenoweth: Chenoweth draws on her decade-long journey into neighborhood schools where low-income students and students of color are learning at unexpectedly high levels to reveal a key ingredient to their success: In one way or another, their leaders have confronted the traditional ways that schools are organized and have adopted new systems, all focused on improvement.
Teaching in Context: The Social Side of Education Reform: This book provides new evidence from a range of leading scholars showing that teachers become more effective when they work in organizations that support them in comprehensive and coordinated ways. The studies featured in the book suggest an alternative approach to enhancing teacher quality: creating conditions and school structures that facilitate the transmission and sharing of knowledge among teachers, allowing teachers to work together effectively, and capitalizing on what we know about how educators learn and improve.
Looking for more inspiration over the holidays. Check out “What You’re Reading to Focus on Strengthening Your Leadership.”
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