Summer is right around the corner, and it is the perfect time for teachers’ reflection, professional growth, and the chance to dive into a good book. Inspired by Pine Crest School’s 2019-24 Strategic Plan, “The Future is Here,” this year’s faculty summer reading supports themes that are reflected in the overarching, guiding question:
“What do our students need to be successful in our ever-changing world?”
In Marching Off the Map, Tim Elmore shares practical, research-based solutions that help adults:
In Making Thinking Visible, a proven program for enhancing students' thinking and comprehension abilities is described.
Visible Thinking is a research-based approach to teaching thinking, begun at Harvard's Project Zero, that develops students' thinking dispositions while at the same time deepening their understanding of the topics they study.
By using this process, thinking becomes visible as the students' different viewpoints are expressed, documented, discussed, and reflected upon.
In Whiplash, Joi Ito and Jeff Howe distill logic into nine organizing principles for navigating and surviving this tumultuous period:
In Better Than Carrots or Sticks, a practical blueprint for creating a cooperative and respectful classroom climate in which students and teachers work through behavioral issues together is documented. The authors establish procedures and expectations for student behavior that encourage the:
This book will support teachers at all levels to ensure that their classrooms are welcoming, enriching, and constructive environments built on collective respect and focused on student achievement.
In Biased, Jennifer Eberhardt explains that unconscious bias can appear without us even realizing it, and even when we genuinely wish to treat all people equally, ingrained stereotypes can infect our visual perception, attention, memory, and behavior. This has an impact on education, employment, housing, and criminal justice.
With a perspective that is at once scientific, investigative, and informed by personal experience, Eberhardt offers us insights into the dilemma and a path forward. She shows us the subtle--and sometimes dramatic--daily repercussions of implicit bias in how teachers grade students, or managers deal with customers.
Eberhardt offers practical suggestions for reform and new practices that are useful for organizations as well as individuals.
Esther Wojcicki is famous for three things: teaching a high school class that has changed the lives of thousands of kids, inspiring Silicon Valley legends like Steve Jobs, and raising three daughters who have each become famously successful.
What do these three accomplishments have in common? They’re the result of TRICK, Wojcicki’s secret to raising successful people: Trust, Respect, Independence, Collaboration, and Kindness. Simple lessons, but the results are radical.
Wojcicki’s methods are the opposite of helicopter parenting. As we face an epidemic of parental anxiety, Wojcicki is here to say: relax. Talk to infants as if they are adults. Allow teenagers to pick projects that relate to the real world and their own passions, and let them figure out how to complete them. Above all, let your child lead.
How to Raise Successful People offers essential lessons for raising, educating, and managing people to their highest potential. Change your parenting, change the world.
Pine Crest faculty submit reading reflections and participate in book discussions when they return to campus in August.