Recommended Reading
Independent Study for Professional Development
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Creating Cultures of Thinking by Ron Ritchhart and his colleagues at Harvard's Project Zero was thought-provoking and transformative. It got me thinking about feedback routines and how I can optimize feedback for my students at school, with particular attention to the timing of the feedback (reserving the most substantive feedback for when they are still in the revision phase and preparing to publish their work) and the format of my comments.
On a related note, check out Project Zero's Thinking Routines Toolbox for various ways to scaffold complex thinking tasks and make student thinking visible.
Project Zero's Thinking Routines Toolbox
I highly recommend reading Donella Meadows's book, Thinking in Systems, to help frame lessons on the Sustainable Development Goals and to help students to develop a global mindset in thinking about how the world's challenges are interrelated.
Behavior Over Time Graphs: Helping students to identify trends by graphing a specific variable and how it has changed over time (possible interdisciplinary connection with math: intro video here)
Systems Zoo & Systems Traps: Case studies like the Tragedy of the Commons will help students to think systemically and try to identify “traps” inherent in their SDG study.
Loopy and Connection Circles: introduced in my kick-off lesson to understand how the different SDGs are interrelated, but this will be modeled in history classes too-- example here.
Gholdy Muhammad's book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy, has an excellent rubric for lesson planning that encourages teachers to consider identity, skills, intellect, and criticality as separate lenses. She quotes Martin Luther King Jr at one moment to explain the philosophy undergirding her approach to teaching students to read with criticality:
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
Muhammad's framework encourages educators to teach in a culturally and historically responsive manner that allows students to feel powerful and connected to the world.
In The Civically Engaged Classroom: Reading, Writing, and Speaking for Change, Mary Ehrenworth, Pablo Wolfe, and Marc Todd outline strategies for teachers who use the workshop model to connect their students with authentic audiences in their communities. My colleagues and I found this book particularly helpful when we were implementing our social issues nonfiction unit. It has great content on anti-bias work and how to facilitate difficult conversations in the classroom, and also contains quality mini lessons on examining primary sources.
In Launch: Using Design Thinking to Boost Creativity and Bring out the Maker in Every Student, John Spencer and A.J. Juliani advocate for an inquiry-based approach to curriculum design. I took a summer course in 2020 with A.J. Juliani about how to facilitate quality online learning, and the resources he provided helped to make my classroom a much more generative space in a year of mostly remote and asynchronous instruction. Spencer and Juliani will get you excited about implementing "Genius Hour" projects at school!
EmpoweringFinal_1.pdfFernando Reimers, a professor at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, offers 60 lesson plan ideas for globalizing your classroom in his book, Empowering Students to Improve the World, available as a complete PDF above.
edu-sustainable-development-guide-15072019-en.pdfExplore more ways to teach using the SDGs with this resource from Oxfam.
The Marshall Memo is a weekly newsletter roundup of important education research. He has published several books with collections of the best articles, but I highly recommend subscribing or asking your school to subscribe, as there is a significant discount that comes with group membership.
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