Today’s post continues a series in which educators share books and articles that have inspired them.

Social Studies Books

Sarah Cooper teaches 8th grade U.S. history and civics and is the associate head of school at Flintridge Preparatory School in La Canada, Calif. She is the author of two books, Creating Citizens: Teaching Civics and Current Events in the History Classroom (Routledge) and Making History Mine (Stenhouse):

So many phenomenal education books appear each year—both from university presses and from K-12 stalwarts such as Heinemann, Stenhouse, Routledge, and ASCD—that it can feel daunting to decide which to read! Here are a handful that have shaped my practice as a civics teacher and academic administrator, especially when times feel polarized and finding accurate news sources feels ever more imperative.

(Clicking on the title will take you to a full review I’ve written on MiddleWeb, a super source for weekly book reviews that have impact on teachers K-12, not just those in the middle grades.)

• Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive Teaching and Learning by Gholdy Muhammad (Scholastic, 2023). I have recommended this gorgeous, inspiring book to more people than I can count, including as an optional summer read for our school’s teachers. For an element of fun, it features coloring pages and a music playlist for each chapter. To transform you and your teaching, it casts the work we are doing as important and legacy building.
  
• Teaching on Days After: Educating for Equity in the Wake of Injustice by Alyssa Hadley Dunn (Teachers College Press, 2022). As a history teacher reading the news these days, it seems that “days after” classroom conversations, following cataclysmic events, arise more frequently than ever. This book urges courage over fear, asking us to respond with humanity each day to the needs of our students. It also notes that this kind of responsive teaching is not a one-off event, but rather that we should be building the approach into meaningful conversations all year long.
  
• Becoming Active Citizens: Practices to Engage Students in Civic Education Across the Curriculum by Tom Driscoll and Shawn W. McCusker (Solution Tree Press, 2022). This book feels like a choose-your-own-adventure of possibility. After opening with a robust case for civics education, its later chapters offer a menu of resources and approaches for authentic experiences, role plays, action-civics projects, media-literacy activities, and more. You will want to lesson plan while reading because the material is so exciting!

Anti-Racism Books

Kwame Sarfo-Mensah is a 17-year veteran educator and the founder and CEO of Identity Talk Consulting LLC, an independent education consulting firm that provides professional development and consulting services. He is also the author of the upcoming book, Learning to Relearn: Supporting identity in a Culturally-Affirming Classroom:

- Start Here, Start Now by Liz Kleinrock - This is probably the fastest I’ve ever read any book! I finished this book in five hours and I couldn’t put it down! It was that good! Even my son Thaddeus had to read along with me for a few pages. Start Here, Start Now is the perfect book for any educators who are in the infant stages of their ABAR (anti-bias and anti-racism) journey. It is a smooth and engaging read that is accessible to all teachers in all content areas.

Liz provides us a restorative approach to addressing the racist actions we witness with our colleagues, staff members, and students within our schools! Throughout the book, Liz is open, honest, and transparent about her own shortcomings in her own journey and how she’s been able to continue building her own capacity as an ABAR teacher. Her humility and own insistence on being a work-in-progress as an ABAR educator brings about a sense of authenticity that allows her to connect to the everyday educator trying to figure out how to engage in this work.

Liz greatly emphasizes the relevance of ABAR work in curriculum, instruction, family and parent engagement, all the STEM fields, and in building an inclusive school climate. With the abundance of strategies, anchor charts, lesson plans, and other teacher resources provided, this book covers all the bases! Every educator needs to have this book in their library, especially if they’re truly committed to doing ABAR work. With all the anti-CRT craziness still happening, every school should use this book as a guide for their ABAR professional development work this coming school year.

- Black Appetite, White Food by Jamilah Lyiscott - I finally read Lyiscott’s Black Appetite. White Food, which is a GREAT book. What I love the most about the book is that Lyiscott unapologetically embraces the dualism of her identity as a distinguished scholar and a proud Brooklynite. Her authenticity and transparency shine throughout the read!

This book eloquently captures how we, as Black and Brown educators, are hungry for liberation and justice but, in the process of our journey, we consume and unconsciously internalize Eurocentric ideals that have been embedded in our brains through our K-12 schooling. That’s how many of us are socialized, and then it isn’t until we get older that we begin to deconstruct these white supremacist ideologies that we unconsciously project on our students.

This is a quick and informative read with a plethora of activities, resources, and tools that you can implement in your classrooms. I highly recommend this book, especially during this crazy time in our world where there’s so much racial tension.

‘Racial Literacy’

Erica Silva, Ed.D., leads professional development with schools and districts across the country to advance educational equity. She is also an adjunct assistant professor and former elementary/middle school teacher and instructional coach. Follow her work @doctorasilva on Twitter/IG:

Antiracist Reading Revolution by Sonja Cherry Paul (2024) - Sonja Cherry-Paul presents an anti-racist reading framework with a focus on six critical lenses for educators to apply to their teaching: affirmation, awareness, authorship, atmosphere, activism, and accountability.

In this book, she encourages educators to do the necessary work of building literacy classrooms that are anti-racist and provides tangible examples of the types of shifts educators must make in their teaching “to create liberatory outcomes for young people.” (p. 25).

Cherry-Paul’s work has been transformative to not only my own work but also to my colleagues’ as well in building our racial literacy, deepening our understanding of culturally relevant education, and challenging us in our practice to ensure that students of color in our classrooms see their identities affirmed, honored, and reflected in our instruction.

Math PD

Luisana González is a 5th grade dual-languageteacher from Illinois. She has always worked with multilingual students since the start of her teaching career in 2005:

I have spent a lot of time during my career seeking out professional development opportunities for teaching language arts and multilingual students. However, the professional development opportunities in the area of mathematics have not been as readily available or robust. Therefore, as soon as I heard about Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics by Peter Liljedahl, I jumped at the opportunity to read it and I devoured it on spring break.

Everything made sense, yet I had not been applying or implementing most of the ideas outlined there to foster engagement and thinking. It required a complete overhaul of my math block. It was going to be turned upside down. Of course, I could start small and build on it as I felt more comfortable, but that is not the type of teacher that I am. If it’s good for my students, I want to do it all, and it has to be done as soon as possible.

The great thing about this resource is that it is very easy to implement and overhaul mathematics teaching even at the smallest scale or change. The author encourages the teacher to keep in mind that no matter what, the change will be disruptive to what most math teachers have been doing in their classrooms. There are so many great ideas and reflection points throughout its 299 pages, and, most importantly, all of it will build thinkers.

Oftentimes, students have learned to be passive learners or are pretty content with mimicking the examples the teacher has provided. It is a sort of “I do, we do, you do what I do” dance, hand held without a strong requirement for thinking but, rather, following a step-by-step procedure. This has been so deeply ingrained in our teaching, yet we may not be engaging students in deep-thinking tasks.

This book really gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own practice and my district’s procedures and expectations. It has motivated me to disrupt what I know about teaching mathematics and at the same time has led me to search for more math PD opportunities like the “Math is FigureOutAble” podcast by Pam Harris.

I have taken a couple of her free webinars and listened to her podcast. She also encourages students to think over any procedural teaching and learning tasks. Both resources have inspired me to help my students build confidence and competence in mathematics. I want them to know that they can figure it out. It’s not magic nor a special talent. We can all be thinkers! I have personally always felt less capable in mathematics and now I know why.

Growing up, I was in the group of students that tried to mimic what was modeled, but I never had the confidence to believe that I could do it all on my own. Looking around my classroom, I can always find myself in some of my students. I always tried to help them in similar ways as my teachers tried to help me, with a handy trick or algorithm, rather than help them build conceptual understanding through deep-thinking tasks. It’s what I have known, yet, not what is best for all.

I am thankful for the opportunity to continue growing as a teacher. I have found helpful applications in other content areas from what I have learned from both of these resources. I enjoy PD opportunities that push me to question, confirm, or contradict what I know. I appreciate the unsettling that both of these resources have brought. It has me questioning how I am creating opportunities or not for building confident and competent thinkers and active engagement all around.

I am thankful for these great educators that show us how to optimize learning through building agency in critical thinking and problem-solving. This type of work is student-centered, always.

Thanks to Sarah, Kwame, Erica, and Luisana for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

What books, articles, videos, or blog posts that have been published within the past four years have you found most helpful to your teaching? Please also explain specifically how they have helped you.

In Part One, Mary Beth Hertz, Altagracia Delgado, Bobson Wong, and Larisa Bukalov shared their recommendations.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social .

Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first 13 years of this blog, you can see a categorized list here.