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MINDFOOD I: Top 10 Books Every Progressive Educator Should read
14 Plays2 years ago
Welcome to our latest podcast series: MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education. In this series, we'll do the random fun stuff: top 10 lists, current events, things we're thinking about. This is a casual format with limited editing and not as many intense conversations that occur in our mainline HRP interviews. Let us know what you think.
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Top 10 Books Every Progressive Educator Should Read
This episode is brought to you by Anna Westlent, Rivka Ocho, and Alexander Gruber. Today we're looking at the top 10 books every progresive educator should read. These are personal recommendations which have inspired Nick and Chris. Of course, this list isn't all encompassing! Next time you're at the library or on Thriftbooks, definitely check one of these out.
This podcast is also available on video! See: https://www.youtube.com/c/HumanRestorationProject
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Mind Food Podcast
00:00:10
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to our first installment of Mind Food, a series of more casual content that's easily digestible.
00:00:16
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by Anna Wendlandt, Rivka Ocho, and Alexander Gruber.
00:00:22
Speaker
Today, we're looking at the top 10 books that every progressive educator should read.
Top 10 Book Recommendations for Progressive Educators
00:00:27
Speaker
These are personal recommendations by Nick and I, and we feel like if you want to be a progressive educator, you should definitely check one of these out.
00:00:34
Speaker
So next time you're at the library or on thrift books or on Amazon or something, you know, maybe add this to your cart and see what's up with it.
00:00:41
Speaker
Before we get started, Nick, is there anything you want to want to say?
00:00:45
Speaker
I got nothing.
00:00:46
Speaker
Let's get to it.
00:00:48
Speaker
All right.
00:00:48
Speaker
So here we
Impact of Lies My Teacher Told Me on Education
00:00:49
Speaker
go.
00:00:49
Speaker
Top 10 books that every progressive educator should read.
00:00:56
Speaker
I hate it so much.
00:00:57
Speaker
All right.
00:00:57
Speaker
So my I decided to organize my top 10 list kind of like in chronology.
00:01:03
Speaker
So kind of tracking my journey into progressive education.
00:01:08
Speaker
And for me, that really starts.
00:01:11
Speaker
The more that I unpack that, for me, that really starts in my history, social science methods classes.
00:01:19
Speaker
I didn't know it at the time, but there's a lot of critical pedagogy embedded in the way that we think about history and historiography.
00:01:27
Speaker
This one is from the recently past now, James Lowen.
00:01:33
Speaker
There were two books that I had to read of James Lowen's in my college methods courses.
00:01:37
Speaker
One probably is maybe fit for a more general audience.
00:01:41
Speaker
And of course, that is Lies My Teacher Told Me.
00:01:43
Speaker
And the title today, I think, would be like very clickbaity, right?
00:01:47
Speaker
But for me, it was...
00:01:50
Speaker
it was kind of like one of those epiphanies or a revelation, right?
00:01:54
Speaker
Kind of talking through those, those hidden histories, the, the way that our textbooks teach them, the way that the state standards are written, the way that different textbooks in different regions cover various topics and kind of tapping into that sense of like history as national myth-making, you know, and mythologizing and how the stories we tell sort of define, um,
00:02:19
Speaker
define our both our past, our present and our future.
Exploring Historical Monuments Through Shadowed Ground
00:02:24
Speaker
So that probably could not be more relevant today, given the contention around the history, the way history is taught around critical race theory and all those things, too, with with an honorable mention again to James Lohan for probably a more history focused book, but it's called Shadowed Ground.
00:02:43
Speaker
Have you ever heard of this book, Chris?
00:02:45
Speaker
I don't know that one.
00:02:47
Speaker
It's actually it's not from James Lowen.
00:02:49
Speaker
Dang it.
00:02:50
Speaker
It's actually from Kenneth.
00:02:51
Speaker
Good start.
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:02:52
Speaker
Great.
00:02:53
Speaker
Sorry.
00:02:53
Speaker
I thought they were both from James Lowen.
00:02:57
Speaker
I remember reading them at the same time.
00:02:59
Speaker
So so maybe that's where the streams got crossed.
00:03:02
Speaker
But it's it's in that same vein, but it's really a.
00:03:06
Speaker
a geographic history of the way that we tell those national myths and stories through monuments, right?
00:03:13
Speaker
And the myth making around those.
00:03:15
Speaker
So, right.
00:03:16
Speaker
How do we, the subtitle of it is America's landscapes of violence and tragedy.
00:03:21
Speaker
And it really is how we build into the,
00:03:26
Speaker
you know, our physical, the architecture, our physical landscape, how we commemorate events, our histories, coming clear up through 9-11, the Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine, but really focused particularly on, you know, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement.
00:03:47
Speaker
And I think that really helped inform a lot of my own pedagogy kind of going forward and giving me a platform to be able to, I guess, a footing to be able to talk
00:03:56
Speaker
in an informed way about, you know, kind of difficult conversations in the classroom, like what should we do with these monuments to the Confederacy?
00:04:06
Speaker
You know, what do we do with the artifacts in the British Museum?
00:04:10
Speaker
You know, how do we kind of commemorate those things in those spaces?
00:04:13
Speaker
So those two books probably are like more
00:04:17
Speaker
historiography, again, the history methods, but really were the jumping off point for me in starting my thinking, my critical thinking about the teaching of history.
00:04:26
Speaker
So what do you got?
00:04:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:28
Speaker
I mean, Lies My Teacher Told Me was one of the first books that got me interested in being a history teacher when I was in high school.
00:04:36
Speaker
Because I was, I think I originally wanted to be an English teacher.
00:04:40
Speaker
And then I swapped after I started diving into those books because they're really accessible for kids.
00:04:44
Speaker
And, uh, yeah, it's just, it's, it's very well written and very easy to understand.
00:04:48
Speaker
I have no idea what that other book is, but I'll have to check it out.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:04:50
Speaker
Well, I've actually, I had used excerpts of lies my teacher told me, uh, in, in my class, you know, and, uh, because it is really digestible about, you know, issues around Columbus and, you know, did Columbus really discover America and just kind of setting some of those big key essential questions.
00:05:07
Speaker
So, all right, you're up.
00:05:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:09
Speaker
All right.
00:05:09
Speaker
So my list is arranged slightly differently.
00:05:14
Speaker
I started off with two, arguably three more niche books that I still think everyone should read, but I think they are very much from my perspective, which
Game Design Principles in Education
00:05:24
Speaker
might differ.
00:05:24
Speaker
They're all from my perspective, but I think these are going to stand out a lot more.
00:05:28
Speaker
And then the rest of them, I think, are just good books in general that everyone should check out.
00:05:32
Speaker
So
00:05:33
Speaker
My number 10 is something that we're incorporating into our upcoming conference.
00:05:37
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And Nick has been seeing me screenshot probably 300 pages of this book because it blows my mind every time I turn the page.
00:05:45
Speaker
And I'm like, man, this connects so much to everything that we talk about.
00:05:49
Speaker
And that is Designing Games, a Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tienen Sylvester.
00:05:56
Speaker
So this is not an education book.
00:05:59
Speaker
This is actually a textbook about designing video games.
00:06:03
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But the book dives into educational philosophy on pretty much every page.
00:06:10
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So Tina and Sylvester, he is the creator of an indie video game called RimWorld, which is one of the best-selling games on PC.
00:06:18
Speaker
It's very popular.
00:06:20
Speaker
And it's kind of known for being a simulation-type game, very similar to The Sims or SimCity, where there's no defined objective.
00:06:29
Speaker
You just kind of do your thing, and you play within this game world, almost like toys.
00:06:34
Speaker
And this book is really a culmination of his understanding of systems and how we think about things like motivation and choice, tutorials, game psychology, and how do we inform players not only to learn games, but then continue playing the game once they've learned it.
00:06:54
Speaker
And every time I read one of these books, but especially this one,
00:06:58
Speaker
I'm shocked at how much it connects to how we learn in the classroom.
00:07:05
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James Paul Gee, the guy who did a lot of video game writing and connecting it to education, I think was kind of
00:07:11
Speaker
the prelude to this.
00:07:12
Speaker
I just recently read, I forget what it's called, but it's like literacy and video games that he had written about 10, 15 years ago.
00:07:19
Speaker
And it's a great book, but it's very dated because the video game references are, if you're under 30 years old, you probably have no idea what he's talking about.
00:07:27
Speaker
There are a couple of decades old by now.
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:07:30
Speaker
So this book gets a lot more into like, why is it that, you know, a kid will pick up
00:07:36
Speaker
Mario, like Mario Odyssey, and fail and fail and fail and fail and play the exact same moon or star 200 times and still have fun doing it?
00:07:48
Speaker
Why are they having fun even though they're failing?
00:07:51
Speaker
Or why is it that some games fail at teaching you tutorials where they just give you all the information up front through text boxes?
00:07:57
Speaker
Like a little dialogue box will pop up and say, hit A to jump and do this to do this.
00:08:01
Speaker
And then you forget about it versus games that teach you experientially.
00:08:05
Speaker
Or they just present you with a gap and then you have to jump over it and you have to figure it out.
00:08:10
Speaker
There are just so many parallels when you're reading this book.
00:08:13
Speaker
And eventually on our YouTube channel, we'll definitely have a presentation that mirrors what we're doing in these conferences that talks about kind of learnings from this book specifically.
00:08:22
Speaker
So yeah, my number 10, Designing Games, a Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tina Sylvester.
00:08:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:08:29
Speaker
And we've even had on game designers.
00:08:32
Speaker
That episode we did a couple of years ago with Seth Koster is still just one of my top 10 because he, without even realizing it, taps into those pedagogical concepts because really the player in this case is the learner.
00:08:45
Speaker
And you as a game designer have to teach the player how to play the game or set up the
00:08:52
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the conditions for the learner to want to be self-directed and provide them the tools and teach them how to use them in the game so that way they can feel motivated to want to continue.
00:09:02
Speaker
So it really is, it's like a lesson in that self-determination theory, right?
00:09:07
Speaker
As a replacement for the behaviorism that we see in classrooms, this one relies on autonomy, competence, relevance, all those other things that game designers are going to use to draw you into that.
00:09:18
Speaker
So
00:09:19
Speaker
And since that conversation, I've been pretty staunchly on the camp of like, educators can learn a lot from game designers.
00:09:25
Speaker
And yeah, we'll have to talk the caveats with that because certainly there's some that maybe tap into more of those behaviorist mechanisms and become gambling machines that are banned in many countries, right?
00:09:38
Speaker
Box systems and those kinds of things, mobile games.
00:09:40
Speaker
But yeah, that's a good one.
00:09:42
Speaker
I have not read that one, but I did read James Paul.
00:09:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:09:46
Speaker
Yes.
00:09:47
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Yeah.
00:09:47
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The virtual Skinner boxes.
00:09:48
Speaker
So that's that's what we want to avoid and maybe have worlds look more like Super Mario Odyssey or Breath of the Wild or Minecraft and those kinds of things, as opposed to, you know, your cookie clickers and your.
00:10:03
Speaker
And one more thing I'll say about that before we move into number nine is there used to historically be that argument like, you know, should kids play video games?
00:10:12
Speaker
Is it rotting their brain or, you know, whatever it might be.
00:10:16
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And it's worth knowing that the modern era, since those arguments really came up in the 80s and 90s, games have just become more and more complex.
00:10:25
Speaker
And a kid who's playing Minecraft is navigating an incredibly complex game with
00:10:32
Speaker
Many, many, many systems.
00:10:34
Speaker
And I think there's a lot to be learned from not only how is that designed, but how is the information presented?
00:10:41
Speaker
How is the player continually wanting to do it?
00:10:43
Speaker
And how are they engaged in it?
00:10:45
Speaker
Because obviously that game is enjoyed by millions upon millions of kids, even kids who are very young.
00:10:52
Speaker
And they are understanding it quite well.
00:10:56
Speaker
So there's definitely something there.
00:11:01
Speaker
I hate it so much.
00:11:02
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:02
Speaker
So my number nine, kind of the next book in my journey, obviously this list isn't comprehensive, but just kind of signposts for me as I, as I progress.
00:11:10
Speaker
So, um, coming out of the college methods classes,
Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Education Reform
00:11:14
Speaker
right.
00:11:14
Speaker
Thinking about history, thinking about teaching history, um,
00:11:17
Speaker
And then going into like 2012, fast forward a few years here.
00:11:21
Speaker
So the context here for me is I'm just about to start my, you know, my first full time teaching job.
00:11:26
Speaker
I'm working at a cemetery.
00:11:28
Speaker
I was a groundskeeper at a cemetery over the summer before then.
00:11:31
Speaker
And every day I would come home, you know, obviously tired.
00:11:34
Speaker
And we lived in this old house in Des Moines and we had this wonderful screened in porch, you know, this old house, but this wonderful screened in porch.
00:11:41
Speaker
We had this
00:11:42
Speaker
Comfy futon.
00:11:43
Speaker
And every day after I came home, I'd just come curl up on the futon and I'd read a book.
00:11:46
Speaker
And one of the books that I read that summer that really shaped my trajectory as an educator was Neil Postman's Teaching as a Subversive Activity.
00:11:56
Speaker
And I think for me, I...
00:11:58
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:59
Speaker
I was just drawn to the title, right?
00:12:00
Speaker
Like just because, you know, just being in that vein anyway, like, oh, hey, teaching, what does this have to offer?
00:12:08
Speaker
And then realizing that this book came out, I think in the 1970s, 1971.
00:12:14
Speaker
I mean, so it's decades old now, but it reads like it could have come out yesterday.
00:12:20
Speaker
just in terms of Postman's perspective on what schools could be.
00:12:25
Speaker
His book was the original version of that, of the Dintersmiths, of the reimagined education.
00:12:31
Speaker
And frankly, there's been very little innovation on that theme since.
00:12:36
Speaker
We're rehashing Postman's ideas in all of this.
00:12:39
Speaker
He's kind of the original one there.
00:12:41
Speaker
But the thing that really stuck with me is just the way that he –
00:12:45
Speaker
you know, he captures those ideas of project-based learning really before that was a thing, you know, before it was the, the, the idea of like design, um, thinking as applied to learning is really hashed out before you had PBL works, you know, providing those tools.
00:13:01
Speaker
Um, because his, his belief first and foremost was that you should have kids involved in doing important work, um, and being connected to the community and answering important questions and all those other kinds of things.
00:13:13
Speaker
So, um,
00:13:15
Speaker
Yeah, that has been a book that has just kind of stuck with me.
00:13:17
Speaker
And I've even gone back to it a couple more times just to refresh my memory every now and then.
00:13:23
Speaker
And it is just striking how recent it sounds and how radical his ideas still even are today.
00:13:29
Speaker
So
00:13:30
Speaker
I suppose in that regard, then there's a little bit of the there's the optimist side where, yeah, we can reimagine education in different ways.
00:13:37
Speaker
And also, I suppose on the pessimistic pessimistic side of that, it's, wow, we really haven't changed things a whole lot since the 1970s.
00:13:45
Speaker
So, yeah, I would say Postman is a must read for anyone wanting to get an into progressive education, get a little bit of the history, get a little bit of the historical perspective and then apply that to stuff today.
00:13:58
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a great book.
00:14:00
Speaker
The only reason why it's not on my list is that there's another book that's very similar that I have coming up that I personally like a little bit more.
00:14:06
Speaker
But I think that they that book is definitely solid.
00:14:10
Speaker
That's definitely on my my bookshelf of must reads.
00:14:13
Speaker
All
The Happiness Industry and Its Impact on Education
00:14:14
Speaker
right.
00:14:14
Speaker
So moving into my number nine, this is my last like
00:14:17
Speaker
fringe one.
00:14:18
Speaker
The rest of them are a lot more mainstream progressive.
00:14:21
Speaker
This is, yeah, this is the book that surprised me the most.
00:14:26
Speaker
And it's, it's very fringe when I picked it up.
00:14:30
Speaker
And it,
00:14:31
Speaker
I actually reviewed this as an education book, even though it's not published as one.
00:14:34
Speaker
It's a book called Manufacturing Happy Citizens by Edgar Kambadas and Eva Ayus, I believe is how you pronounce it.
00:14:45
Speaker
And the subtitle is How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives.
00:14:51
Speaker
So this book outlines the growth of the happiness movement, which you see a lot in corporate America, especially.
00:15:00
Speaker
And it traces back the research and funding of happiness studies.
00:15:06
Speaker
So studies that focus on those apps on your phone that tell you how to be happier today and give you daily mantras where you teach you how to do yoga, to relax, etc.
00:15:16
Speaker
And
00:15:18
Speaker
it connects that to the increasing exploitation of the working class and how more and more corporate entities are paying for these happiness camps and happiness stipends, etc., while simultaneously making you work more and more.
00:15:37
Speaker
So the systemic issue of corporate exploitations there with a band-aid of happiness research.
00:15:43
Speaker
And they take it one step further by highlighting how
00:15:47
Speaker
The ABA and other scientific organizations were basically paid off by corporations because the same people that fund these studies are the same people that own these massive organizations that want those studies to be true.
00:16:00
Speaker
So it's interesting because it reminds me a lot of what goes on in global warming where large corporations will pay against the science.
00:16:08
Speaker
But in this case, the science around happiness research is skewed the other direction.
00:16:13
Speaker
the quote-unquote like real studies that highlight the issues with these apps, the issues with
00:16:20
Speaker
these programs kind of get buried because we live in a society that values money over all else.
00:16:26
Speaker
The reason why I think this matters as an education book, however, is that it talks a lot about SEL and mindfulness.
00:16:34
Speaker
In fact, half the book is about the science behind SEL and mindfulness and what it actually means to be content and what it actually means to be happy.
00:16:43
Speaker
And the thesis is essentially that we need systemic reform, both in schools and in workplaces, so that people don't need apps or programs to be content.
00:16:57
Speaker
It reminds me a lot of how in schools you'll find, like during standardized testing week, they might have like a movie night or yoga in the morning or a dance competition or something to like lessen the edge off.
00:17:09
Speaker
But of course, there has to be the question, like, if we know it leads to all of the stress and anxiety, why are we not changing the test itself?
00:17:16
Speaker
Like, why do we need to apply a Band-Aid fix?
00:17:18
Speaker
The
00:17:21
Speaker
The shocking part of a lot of the work that we do as educators, and it leads to a lot of burnout, is we're constantly looking for ways to circumvent the issues with the system while not looking at those systemic issues to begin with because we feel like we're powerless to control them.
00:17:36
Speaker
The standardized testing industry is huge, but there's also things like grades and discipline and purpose-finding, all these other things that we talk about on our podcast and through our organization that are massive hills to climb.
00:17:48
Speaker
But until those underlying issues are solved, you're just working like Sisyphus.
00:17:55
Speaker
You need something to change that overall idea.
00:17:57
Speaker
But yeah, this book blew my mind.
00:17:59
Speaker
It's so clear on exactly what all these issues are, and it highlights kind of the BS, especially in the ed tech industry, and why we need to know about it.
00:18:09
Speaker
That's my number nine.
00:18:11
Speaker
The through line through this, right, is like that individualization of systemic problems.
00:18:16
Speaker
You know, happiness, if you just looked at the United States just generally, right, the economic system, our commutes and like the way that we manage transportation, that our healthcare systems work just generally, you know, the stress that pandemic
00:18:34
Speaker
parents are under, especially as working parents and trying to balance their child's activities and their family with their work-life balance.
00:18:43
Speaker
All of those things combined to produce people that are generally angsty, anxious, and unhappy.
00:18:50
Speaker
And there is a cottage industry in managing your own mental health and managing your happiness.
00:18:56
Speaker
And while that is certainly part of it, I think a lot of
00:19:00
Speaker
Even modern research around the use of prescription drugs and pharmaceuticals around depression and anxiety and those kinds of things recognize that those kind of make it easy for you to adapt to those kinds of things, but they don't address the problem is systemic.
00:19:17
Speaker
The problem exists in the world, not in the individual.
00:19:22
Speaker
And, yeah, the through line through education there is, well, we do a lot of the same stuff in education, right?
00:19:28
Speaker
We individualize rather than look at system systemic reform to see why things may are or are not working or are producing adverse outcomes in a lot of other ways.
00:19:39
Speaker
That's a good one.
00:19:40
Speaker
I haven't read that one.
00:19:40
Speaker
Yeah.
00:19:41
Speaker
Two quick things about it.
00:19:43
Speaker
One, it definitely covers the corporization of the happiness industry.
00:19:47
Speaker
Like, why is it that we need to feel like we are happy all the time?
00:19:50
Speaker
Why can't we just be content?
00:19:52
Speaker
And why can't we normalize the fact that sometimes it's okay to be sad and depressed?
00:19:57
Speaker
Because advertising agencies will make you think that the solution to everything is just to kind of blow all your problems away with money.
00:20:03
Speaker
The second thing that reminds me of is, and I'm sure every educator has had to do one of these, is the professional development over work-life balance.
00:20:12
Speaker
So like the perfect example of adding on something that makes no sense.
00:20:16
Speaker
I'll never forget going into a PD where I had to, on a large exercise ball, balance myself on it to symbolize the idea of a work-life balance and a three-hour PD on a day I could have had off.
00:20:32
Speaker
Uh, so the, the irony is, is just, is this there?
00:20:35
Speaker
All right.
00:20:39
Speaker
They only get more intense as time goes on.
00:20:42
Speaker
It makes me feel, yeah.
00:20:43
Speaker
It's like I got a kill streak in CS go or something is what this is.
00:20:46
Speaker
All right.
00:20:46
Speaker
So right.
00:20:46
Speaker
Number eight.
00:20:47
Speaker
Well, okay.
00:20:48
Speaker
So continuing in my trajectory, I want to say, um, you know, it was around the same time.
00:20:54
Speaker
So 2012 is what I would have encountered, um, postman for the first time.
00:20:59
Speaker
teach for a couple of years, start to feel who I am in the classroom and how I'm interacting with students, how I want to build the courses that I'm teaching.
00:21:07
Speaker
And then sometime in the early 20 teens encountering Star Saxton's Hacking Assessment.
00:21:15
Speaker
And this was the first book that I had ever approached that even broached the idea of gradeless learning or going gradeless.
00:21:23
Speaker
And
00:21:24
Speaker
Right.
00:21:24
Speaker
How to structure things differently.
00:21:26
Speaker
And this actually led to practical.
00:21:28
Speaker
So like whereas Postman and some of the other books I'm talking about here kind of lead to those theoretical changes.
00:21:33
Speaker
Saxton's book was what I needed to be like, OK, how do I do this in practice?
00:21:36
Speaker
Right.
00:21:37
Speaker
How can I put Postman's vision, which I, again, had no concept of progressive education at the time into practice?
00:21:43
Speaker
And in Saxton's book gives you that language and some of those tools.
00:21:47
Speaker
Right.
00:21:47
Speaker
Right.
00:21:47
Speaker
For feedback, for portfolios, for student driven conferences, for project based learning and kind of broke my paradigm of.
00:21:57
Speaker
And I taught in a very kind of traditional suburban school, you know, and kids were used to just the chapter quiz, chapter quiz, chapter quiz, unit test, chapter quiz, chapter quiz, unit test and.
00:22:08
Speaker
You know, as as I progressed as an educator and learn more kind of the not only the dissatisfaction with the way that I felt that that was going in terms of not really challenging students, not being particularly memorable or, you know, engaging for kids who really didn't care about history.
00:22:25
Speaker
So that really was a turning point for me to grab onto it and say, well, hey, what if I kind of dumped that old model and tried something new?
00:22:31
Speaker
And really every year since reading Star-Saxein's book has just been iteration on that theme, trying to incorporate student feedback into instruction and assessment and then kind of
00:22:44
Speaker
working in the various self-grading tools and all those things that Star Saxion gave.
00:22:50
Speaker
So a couple of years ago, we actually did a summit with Star.
00:22:54
Speaker
We've since talked with her on a lot of issues.
00:22:56
Speaker
And it's just really been coming full circle.
00:23:00
Speaker
Those conversations just give me so much joy to know that she is still doing that work.
00:23:04
Speaker
I think she might even have a new updated edition of Hacking Assessment coming out.
00:23:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:23:09
Speaker
in the next year.
00:23:10
Speaker
I don't know exactly when, but I remember talking to her about that a couple months ago.
00:23:13
Speaker
So, yep, that has to be on any progressive educators reading list.
00:23:19
Speaker
Yeah, I didn't even, apologies to Star Saxe, I didn't even think of that book.
00:23:24
Speaker
I don't know if I would have put it in my top 10, but it would be pretty close.
00:23:27
Speaker
That's a very strong book.
00:23:28
Speaker
All the hacking books are pretty darn good, but the Hacking Assessment book definitely is the standout on solid strategic ways to incorporate some of these ideas.
00:23:39
Speaker
All right, so my number eight is the arguably fringe one, but I don't think it should be fringe.
00:23:45
Speaker
So the other two, like I get, like why you might look at those and go like, that's not progressive ed book.
00:23:50
Speaker
I think this is a progressive ed book, and it's just something that we don't talk often enough about.
00:23:56
Speaker
And it's the weird system on the 20 systems diagram of HRP of actions towards systemic change.
00:24:03
Speaker
The one that everyone's like, why is that in there?
00:24:05
Speaker
I know exactly what this is going to be.
00:24:08
Speaker
So...
00:24:09
Speaker
You know, every single day when you go to school and every single person had to deal with this, pretty much no matter what school they went to at around, at least in my case, 1030 a.m., you eat lunch.
00:24:22
Speaker
And typically, unless you go to a pretty well-funded school, the lunch kind of sucks.
00:24:28
Speaker
You might have an option for a few like fried options.
00:24:32
Speaker
I remember kids would eat like potato chips every day and pizza because they didn't want to touch the food.
00:24:37
Speaker
Anyways, all of this to say,
00:24:39
Speaker
My number eight book is called The Labor of Lunch, Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools by Jennifer E. Gattis.
00:24:49
Speaker
So this remains my, not only one of my favorite books on progressive ed,
00:24:54
Speaker
But my favorite podcast that we've ever done, Human Restoration Project, I don't remember how long ago this was, I want to say it's in the 60s.
00:25:00
Speaker
So like two, maybe three years ago, we had Jennifer on.
00:25:05
Speaker
And this book blew my mind.
00:25:07
Speaker
So this book is about tracing the history of the lunchroom back to the very beginnings of public school in the United States.
00:25:15
Speaker
So way back in the early 1900s and how lunch worked, tracing it through both when it was like locally sourced and like
00:25:23
Speaker
Parents would come in and make the food all the way up until now, where in the last, I believe it's like 20 or 30 years, we saw more and more contracts with these massive mega corporations that
00:25:39
Speaker
essentially can provide food services through cheaper means, arguably, through like these really extended contracts.
00:25:47
Speaker
Basically, you're buying in bulk.
00:25:48
Speaker
Like if you sign up for five or 10 years, it's cheaper than if you were to kind of contract it out year by year.
00:25:55
Speaker
Now, what's interesting is, and the reason why it blew my mind,
00:25:58
Speaker
is that it presents evidence that it's actually far cheaper to utilize smaller farm-to-table methods through unionized or worker-owned collectives to supply the food.
00:26:11
Speaker
It's far cheaper, like 60 cents on a dollar.
00:26:15
Speaker
The organization that you would learn more about this from would be Chef Anne Foundation, who...
00:26:21
Speaker
If Chef Anne Foundation's ever listening to this, I want to have you on the podcast because you never respond.
00:26:25
Speaker
But Chef Anne Foundation's an awesome org that's mentioned multiple times in this book.
00:26:29
Speaker
They work with schools to bring about farm-to-table meals.
00:26:33
Speaker
And there are numerous reasons why this is important.
00:26:36
Speaker
One, it's cheaper.
00:26:37
Speaker
But two, it's healthier.
00:26:38
Speaker
And the kids actually want to eat the food.
00:26:40
Speaker
And there's an argument there for why...
00:26:44
Speaker
are we not treating lunch like it's part of the school day?
00:26:47
Speaker
And I don't mean like make a curriculum out of it.
00:26:49
Speaker
I mean, learn experientially by having lunch.
00:26:53
Speaker
I think about that Michael Moore documentary, Where to Invade Next, which I always used to show the lunch segment because this came up in one of my history classes way back in the day.
00:27:04
Speaker
I never saw that.
00:27:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:05
Speaker
So it's a tongue-in-cheek movie about, it's Michael Moore, so it has a slant, but it's a tongue-in-cheek film about what countries to invade to steal their ideas.
00:27:16
Speaker
So his thesis is, America wants to invade everywhere.
00:27:20
Speaker
Why don't we invade places like France in order to steal their free healthcare or Italy for their massive long vacation days?
00:27:29
Speaker
And the one that I always showed was in France, their public school system, they have a three-course to five-course meal every single time they have lunch with real silverware, professional chefs, like everything.
00:27:43
Speaker
They're eating like charcuterie boards and like salmon for lunch.
00:27:50
Speaker
And the idea is, one, kids learn table manners because they use real silverware and they sit at the table all together.
00:27:57
Speaker
So they're like learning how to eat properly.
00:27:59
Speaker
I mean, it is France.
00:28:01
Speaker
Two, they have a very balanced nutritional diet.
00:28:06
Speaker
And as probably any parent knows, when you're super young, like first grade, second grade, third grade, kindergarten, that's when you want to expose your kids to a lot of different types of food.
00:28:15
Speaker
So they give them a lot of like
00:28:18
Speaker
different flavor profiles.
00:28:19
Speaker
So that way kids don't just get hooked on chicken tenders when they're young.
00:28:23
Speaker
They're used to eating tilapia.
00:28:25
Speaker
You know, it's not like weird and fishy.
00:28:28
Speaker
So they learn about how to eat different things.
00:28:30
Speaker
And then finally, they teach them what a balanced meal looks like.
00:28:33
Speaker
So they drink water or like some like water-based type thing like Gatorade, like Gatorade Zero or whatever.
00:28:39
Speaker
They drink...
00:28:40
Speaker
Or they eat healthy snacks like fruit.
00:28:43
Speaker
And they're also full for the rest of the day, which is a novel concept.
00:28:48
Speaker
I remember going through school and starving because I would never want to eat anything.
00:28:53
Speaker
And also, our lunchtime was so early.
00:28:54
Speaker
And they have an hour-long lunch as an extended break.
00:28:58
Speaker
So all of that to say, that's a really long-winded explanation of the fact that we should be looking at lunch as a cornerstone system in progressive ed.
00:29:06
Speaker
It is not a throwaway just for the middle of the day.
00:29:07
Speaker
That is a real part of the school day.
00:29:09
Speaker
And we should be looking at ways to think deeper about that.
00:29:13
Speaker
So my number eight is The Labor of Lunch by Jennifer Adams.
00:29:16
Speaker
This just became an episode about that book.
00:29:19
Speaker
If we just would have let Chris keep going.
00:29:21
Speaker
I could keep going.
00:29:22
Speaker
I love that book.
00:29:23
Speaker
Yeah, it is so fascinating just to think about my own.
00:29:26
Speaker
I feel like seventh grade, I have very vivid memories of lunch for some reason.
00:29:30
Speaker
I don't know why beforehand, afterwards, like it is what it is.
00:29:33
Speaker
But seventh grade, I remember like there were there was like an a la carte line that you could get Little Debbie snack cakes in and you could get milkshakes and you could get so you could send your kid to school with five bucks and they would have two zebra cakes and a milkshake, like call it good and never have to touch.
00:29:52
Speaker
Anything that's not, you know, mass produced junk food.
00:29:56
Speaker
So it's at.
00:29:57
Speaker
Yeah, it's absolutely insane how we can't seem to synchronize transforming school systems with the with the food systems and connecting the dots to student health and cognitive growth and and their health and well-being and their learning communities as well.
00:30:12
Speaker
So what a bizarre thing.
00:30:15
Speaker
Sure.
00:30:16
Speaker
All right.
00:30:19
Speaker
All right.
00:30:20
Speaker
So seven is, I mean, if I had, if I was ranking this list based on like books that were the most impactful, um, Alfie Cohn's, the schools our children deserve would probably be, um, at or near the top of that list.
00:30:33
Speaker
So again, kind of thinking in my chronology, um, star Saxton's book kind of giving some practice and, uh, some protocols and some ideas and things to try out.
00:30:43
Speaker
And I tried out a lot of them, but Cohn's work is really rooted more in, um,
00:30:48
Speaker
summarizing, anthologizing the research and actually putting a skeleton, an outline on this idea of progressive education.
00:30:57
Speaker
And so it really was after I read Alfie Cohn's The Schools Our Children Deserve that I started to perhaps identify more as a progressive educator and really knowing what it is.
00:31:07
Speaker
Because the book is kind of, again, it's an anthology of a lot of his different ideas on grades, on standardized assessment, on
00:31:15
Speaker
God, you name it, discipline practices, all of those.
00:31:19
Speaker
And probably if I were to thumb through this book, there's going to be underlines, yep, dog-eared pages with excerpts that I thought were particularly interesting.
00:31:29
Speaker
powerful.
00:31:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:31
Speaker
And again, these are all separate essays that are kind of available elsewhere, but just to have them all in one thing.
00:31:37
Speaker
I remember sharing some excerpts with my instructional coach at the time and just being like, did you have any idea that this was even possible that you could do discipline a different way or that you could, you know, do some of this moving beyond grades?
00:31:50
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:50
Speaker
The, uh,
00:31:52
Speaker
his essay in here from, what is it called?
00:31:55
Speaker
From degrading to degrading is still, I mean, probably HRP all time classic.
00:32:01
Speaker
Like if we do PD on ungrading, that is like our go-to essay there.
00:32:06
Speaker
So yeah, code is kind of getting,
00:32:10
Speaker
getting putting a holistic framework on progressive education and yeah, coming at a very important time in my career too.
00:32:20
Speaker
So it's kind of after that, I suppose that sort of radicalized me to be like, man, why, why do we do anything the way that we do it?
00:32:26
Speaker
And who benefits from that and et cetera, et cetera.
00:32:28
Speaker
So it's good when cone is cone is probably like the most
00:32:33
Speaker
well-known writer that brings people into the progressive education field.
00:32:37
Speaker
You pretty much can't talk to a progressive educator without Cone coming up at some point.
00:32:43
Speaker
I think the reason is that his work is very accessible.
00:32:47
Speaker
Not only is it all free, but there's not a lot of fluff.
00:32:51
Speaker
My main issue with a lot of education books is that there's too many stories, there's too many just like 10 pages of just like background information.
00:32:58
Speaker
Just tell me the things I need to know.
00:33:00
Speaker
And Cone is very research heavy.
00:33:03
Speaker
He's very, he's not very personable.
00:33:07
Speaker
And I don't mean that as like an insult.
00:33:08
Speaker
Like it's just the way it's written.
00:33:10
Speaker
Like it's very like factual and to the point.
00:33:12
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:12
Speaker
And I like that.
00:33:13
Speaker
I mean, I've always tried to emulate that and the stuff that we put out too, that it's not story driven.
00:33:18
Speaker
It's just like, there's no emotional connection when you're reading this.
00:33:21
Speaker
It's like, this is why it works.
00:33:22
Speaker
Here you go.
00:33:23
Speaker
Done.
00:33:24
Speaker
And you can kind of fill in your own stories a lot as you go.
00:33:27
Speaker
It is wild to think, too, that Alfie Cohn was such a high profile.
00:33:33
Speaker
He was a public figure.
00:33:34
Speaker
I mean, he was on Oprah.
00:33:35
Speaker
He was a household name in the 1990s.
00:33:39
Speaker
And it's wild to think of who that could even be today.
00:33:43
Speaker
Even somebody like Tony Wagner or Ted Dintersmith or kind of think of the pantheon of edge of celebrities today can't even touch where Alfie Cohn was in the 1990s.
00:33:52
Speaker
And it's just...
00:33:56
Speaker
It's wild to me how we've moved so far in that other direction.
00:33:59
Speaker
Here's this voice that came out against, you know, these kind of, um,
00:34:04
Speaker
these, these tough standard, you know, very rigorous curriculums in the classroom, but also right.
00:34:09
Speaker
Talk to parents about parenting styles and talk to, you know, kind of just was a social, social critic at the same time.
00:34:19
Speaker
Just, just wild to think of, of how his career has gone.
00:34:22
Speaker
And, and I wonder what the next book he's going to put out is like, I haven't seen him, you know, put out new material in a long time.
00:34:28
Speaker
So I'll, I'll be curious to follow up with him on that.
00:34:31
Speaker
Yeah, well, I think it connects well to my number seven.
00:34:34
Speaker
And this might be a crossover later on.
00:34:36
Speaker
I'm not sure.
00:34:37
Speaker
But my number seven is Timeless Learning.
00:34:41
Speaker
How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools.
00:34:45
Speaker
This is by Pam Moran, Ira Sokol, and Chad Rapp.
00:34:49
Speaker
So Timeless Learning to me is kind of like Alfie Cohn the workbook.
00:34:55
Speaker
So while Alfie Cohn might present all the research and give you sometimes almost like a cynical look because you'll read through it and it just feels like the world's collapsing in because there's all these issues and there's all this research to support it.
00:35:07
Speaker
Timeless Learning presents similar information but also gives you...
00:35:13
Speaker
essentially hope it gives you discussion questions it gives you activities to do it is very much designed to something that you would use in a professional development environment to incorporate progressive education specifically it brings up that concept of zero-based thinking like what would you do in the classroom if there was no existing norms if all of these systems weren't there what would you do
00:35:36
Speaker
And it makes you think a lot about, you know, how could we do things differently?
00:35:40
Speaker
Also, the foreword's really good.
00:35:41
Speaker
The foreword's written by Young Joe, who's on our board.
00:35:44
Speaker
So, you know, I've always been a huge fan of Pam and Ira and Chad and the work that they're doing because not only are they writing about this, but all of them worked in public schools.
00:35:56
Speaker
They have done the work.
00:35:58
Speaker
Yes, they actually have a real thing.
00:36:00
Speaker
I'll never forget reading about Ira Sokol's...
00:36:03
Speaker
gym program.
00:36:05
Speaker
It obviously isn't his, but I got a school where they transformed the often stressful curriculum based gym program where everyone does the same thing and you go get changed into your gross shorts and you run a mile around the track or whatever, which doesn't inspire kids who aren't healthy to all of a sudden be healthy.
00:36:23
Speaker
Lifelong fitness.
00:36:24
Speaker
I'm a living example.
00:36:26
Speaker
Yes, but
00:36:27
Speaker
the instead they convert it to be more of a gym type environment where there's all these different options between games and gym equipment so like if you're someone who's on the football team you can lift and you can like log and like learn good form etc whereas you're someone who spent all day playing video games uh maybe you could play a game with your friends that involves physical activity or if you're hiking or walking around things that aren't as strenuous that aren't as repetitive um
00:36:54
Speaker
but still involve healthy lifestyles.
00:36:56
Speaker
So there's a lot of ideas like that in this book that really shift your pedagogy.
00:37:01
Speaker
So yeah, Timeless Learning by Pam Moran, Ira Sokol, and Chad
00:37:06
Speaker
And that one is just the best because of exactly that reason.
00:37:11
Speaker
I don't know if Alfie Cohn was ever a classroom teacher, right?
00:37:14
Speaker
But he's kind of approaching things from one lens.
00:37:16
Speaker
He talked for a few years.
00:37:19
Speaker
The authors of Timeless Learning, they're talking about all the things that they've done.
00:37:23
Speaker
So when people critique progressive education and say, oh, that would never work, or this is not feasible, this isn't possible, they're like,
00:37:30
Speaker
The hell it isn't.
00:37:31
Speaker
Like, we've done this.
00:37:32
Speaker
This is the example of what I've done in my school when Pam Moran was the superintendent, right?
00:37:37
Speaker
Ira Sokal as a teacher in the district, Chad Ratliff, you know, the makerspace programs that they've created, the, you know, just the way that they approach the physical design of the building to support learners in that too.
00:37:49
Speaker
It's just
00:37:50
Speaker
Again, it's such a holistic perspective, but they're like, we've actually done the work and put it into practice.
00:37:55
Speaker
Here it all is.
00:37:57
Speaker
You can decide for yourself if you think it works or not, or if this sounds like a better vision than what kids are used to.
00:38:03
Speaker
So such a powerful example.
00:38:04
Speaker
And you know what?
00:38:05
Speaker
I did not put that on my list because I figured you were going to do that.
00:38:07
Speaker
So I'm glad I'm glad that I didn't.
00:38:09
Speaker
So we have an extra one up here.
00:38:11
Speaker
I thought for sure that would be a crossover.
00:38:13
Speaker
No.
00:38:15
Speaker
Six.
00:38:16
Speaker
Okay.
00:38:16
Speaker
Okay, cool.
00:38:17
Speaker
Now, this one, I actually tried to go back through and pick some methods books, which is weird because these are not people who would be progressive household names.
00:38:27
Speaker
These probably aren't even writers and researchers who would consider themselves progressive educators or whatever, right?
00:38:34
Speaker
But this was an interesting book that, again, came to me at an interesting time.
00:38:38
Speaker
And I was taking a license renewal class X number of years into my career.
00:38:43
Speaker
And took a course, you know, a licensed real course over this book from Jim Burke.
00:38:47
Speaker
It's called What's the Big Idea?
00:38:50
Speaker
Question-driven units to motivate reading, writing, and thinking.
00:38:53
Speaker
And so, right, again, a frustration with the curriculum is that it's so atomized into lists of things that you have to memorize and then test about, et cetera.
00:39:02
Speaker
This really just strips it all away and asks that question.
00:39:05
Speaker
Okay, what's the big idea?
00:39:06
Speaker
How can we reformulate that?
00:39:08
Speaker
Our units of instruction, you know, the things that we might consider as learning progressions, not around the content of a textbook, but around what matters, right?
00:39:17
Speaker
What is the core concept here?
00:39:19
Speaker
What's the big picture question that we're going to have our kids answer?
00:39:22
Speaker
And then what artifacts we're going to, you know, gather along the way.
00:39:25
Speaker
It really is kind of like a design process.
00:39:27
Speaker
thinking book applied to conceptual learning.
00:39:32
Speaker
And it really was as a result of reading this book that I did just that.
00:39:36
Speaker
I went back through my world history units.
00:39:38
Speaker
I reworked them around those big essential questions.
00:39:42
Speaker
And one of the more powerful things, one of the more powerful units that came out about that was for our imperialism unit, I thought I had good activities and things for it.
00:39:52
Speaker
for imperialism unit, but it really just followed the course of the textbook and yada yada.
00:39:57
Speaker
And I was just like, okay, I'm going to throw all of that out.
00:39:59
Speaker
So this is years and years later.
00:40:01
Speaker
I'm going to throw that all out and I'm going to rework it around this big question.
00:40:05
Speaker
What should we do with the artifacts in the British Museum?
00:40:08
Speaker
And then organizing the entire unit around, you know, documents and virtual explorations, op eds, you know, both sides exploring those things.
00:40:19
Speaker
And the end result was students having to, like, justify and, like, curate their own kind of, like, avert.
00:40:28
Speaker
It's kind of like create your own DBQ, right?
00:40:30
Speaker
You select documents, artifacts and things, and you use those to make your case for what we should do with them.
00:40:36
Speaker
Should we give artifacts back?
00:40:37
Speaker
Should we, you know, what different kinds of things?
00:40:40
Speaker
And just framing it in that question, the discussions that we had and, you know, it was such a deeper learning experience than...
00:40:49
Speaker
You know, some of the things, again, good activities that, you know, students had done successfully well on in the past, just kind of reshaping that into that bigger picture thing.
00:41:00
Speaker
That's just one example.
00:41:01
Speaker
But I found just the learning was a lot more engaging.
00:41:05
Speaker
I was more engaged in it, too.
00:41:08
Speaker
And really, it pushed my boundaries as like a resource curator because I couldn't rely on the old tools and textbooks and things that I had.
00:41:16
Speaker
I really had to
00:41:17
Speaker
had to branch out into that area.
00:41:19
Speaker
So a good book, Jim Burke, What's the Big Idea?
00:41:22
Speaker
I wonder if that's where Dan Kearney got the name for his podcast from.
00:41:26
Speaker
Shout out to Dan.
00:41:27
Speaker
The podcast, What's the Big Idea, is a very good podcast.
00:41:31
Speaker
It is.
00:41:32
Speaker
And he is the podcast kind of gets the same thing, right?
00:41:34
Speaker
Just drill down to the essentials.
00:41:36
Speaker
What are you going to do?
00:41:37
Speaker
And again, since it's since it's a methods book, it has just real practical, you know, it has examples of organizers and protocols.
00:41:46
Speaker
And here's how you get kids to ask questions.
00:41:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:41:50
Speaker
So my number six is quite similar.
00:41:54
Speaker
I actually see it very similar to my last pick, which was Timeless Learning, because it's written in a very similar way.
00:42:01
Speaker
But it's also got a lot of practical stuff in there that you could actually use.
00:42:04
Speaker
This is, I think, the newest book on my list by a mile, because I think it came out last year, maybe two years ago.
00:42:10
Speaker
And that is Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education by friend of the show, Alex Vennett, who was on our podcast not too long ago, talking about, I believe it was actually on this book.
00:42:23
Speaker
It might have been when it first came out.
00:42:25
Speaker
Equity-centered trauma-informed education is one of those books where every single time I read it, I was like, did we write this book?
00:42:32
Speaker
Because it's so similar to everything that it is that we're talking about.
00:42:36
Speaker
To me, it's a perfect connection between the Manufacturing Happy Citizens book, which is about the issues with mindfulness programs, and
00:42:44
Speaker
with Timeless Learning, which is a book that talks about how do you actually build a school that incorporates progressive education.
00:42:50
Speaker
This book talks about how do you build classrooms in schools that are trauma-informed.
00:42:57
Speaker
And
00:42:58
Speaker
Alex's primary argument throughout the entire book is we need to be looking at underlying systems that cause trauma and that cause inequity as opposed to putting band-aids on things.
00:43:11
Speaker
So she runs through one, like what does it mean to be trauma-informed, which is not only an important topic, but it's one of those things that I personally find it hard to get PD on, at least PD that gets this deep, that isn't just those tacked on programs.
00:43:26
Speaker
And it also dives into how does an everyday teacher combat inequity in the classroom when there's all of these different forces and kind of imperialist, capitalist, hegemonic ideas that are just located in everything that we do.
00:43:42
Speaker
Um, it, it not only offers an explanation of all those things, but again, it offers like activities you can do.
00:43:47
Speaker
It offers templates.
00:43:48
Speaker
It offers discussion questions.
00:43:50
Speaker
It is very much designed to be a PD book.
00:43:53
Speaker
And therefore it's something that everyone could, could use to think critically about, uh, their practice.
00:43:59
Speaker
So yeah, I, I love that book.
00:44:01
Speaker
It's that's definitely worth a pickup if only just because it's so timely, it's written post pandemic.
00:44:06
Speaker
So it has that, uh, context, uh,
00:44:08
Speaker
That's equity-centered, trauma-informed education by Alex Bennett.
00:44:14
Speaker
Great book.
00:44:15
Speaker
And Alex is an amazing person, great learner.
00:44:18
Speaker
I mean, her energy and engagement and curiosity is always, it always bounces off onto me whenever we have interactions too.
00:44:27
Speaker
So love, love Alex's work too.
00:44:30
Speaker
All right, what's next?
00:44:35
Speaker
This is going to be five hours long.
00:44:39
Speaker
OK, so number five is another methods book.
00:44:41
Speaker
Again, I'm trying to go for some cuts that I thought may be useful again in my trajectory coming off of what's the big idea.
00:44:47
Speaker
Another, you know, you can kind of tell this is around my license renewal time.
00:44:51
Speaker
So I had to gobble up all these credits.
00:44:53
Speaker
So so and I.
00:44:55
Speaker
to be a Frank, I was not expecting to get as much out of either of these as I was right.
00:44:58
Speaker
You know, you do the license renewal credits kind of as a formality and it just kind of is what it is.
00:45:03
Speaker
I tried to pick some things that I thought were more aligned to me, but you never know how that's going to go.
00:45:07
Speaker
So my, my next one is actually from authors, John Antonetti and James Garver.
00:45:14
Speaker
And it's 17,000 classroom visits.
00:45:17
Speaker
Can't be wrong strategies that engage students, promote active learning and boost achievement.
00:45:22
Speaker
And,
00:45:24
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, I know.
00:45:26
Speaker
Right.
00:45:26
Speaker
Again, it was it was like a book study class around around this.
00:45:29
Speaker
And the reason why I pick this is because this kind of came about at a time to where we were engaged in a lot of curriculum conversations that that word rigor kept popping up.
00:45:40
Speaker
And our district was using, you know, Bloom's taxonomy to root all these conversations.
00:45:48
Speaker
And I found it so limiting just to, you know, because they treated Bloom's as a ladder, you know, where you'd have to start with these base and proceed through all these things.
00:45:57
Speaker
And in my opinion, it made our unit planning suck.
00:46:00
Speaker
It made it boring and it made it, you know,
00:46:03
Speaker
Students had to jump through a lot of unnecessary hoops to get to the meaningful, important things because they're like, no, they have to memorize these vocabulary words first.
00:46:11
Speaker
And I hated it.
00:46:11
Speaker
OK, so I'm great to have on curriculum review, by the way.
00:46:14
Speaker
But this actually came with and kind of built their book around this powerful task rubric for designing student work.
00:46:24
Speaker
And so really it was picking, you know, as you go through a unit of study and as you go to design like, hey, here's what we're going to have students do with this.
00:46:34
Speaker
Instead of saying, right, it's going to be based on this Bloom's ladder or this Bloom's hierarchy or whatever.
00:46:38
Speaker
It's going to be based on these three qualities, cognitive demand, academic strategies and engaging qualities.
00:46:45
Speaker
And then it kind of ranks them in a one, two, three or four.
00:46:47
Speaker
And their rigor divide is.
00:46:50
Speaker
actually is then like a cross section of all of those skills.
00:46:54
Speaker
Right.
00:46:54
Speaker
So we would just say, okay, at the highest end of things, the, the, the,
00:47:02
Speaker
The instruction or the assessment part that you're evaluating would have students evaluate or create.
00:47:07
Speaker
That's the only Bloom's interaction.
00:47:09
Speaker
Everything else says, right, comparing patterns or adding, combining, or ignoring patterns, extending thinking, doing mathematics, compare and contrasting, personalizing or making unique decisions about content, creating a new representation, identify and extend patterns, explain and defend or justify ideas.
00:47:30
Speaker
Right.
00:47:31
Speaker
Sounds a lot like our interdisciplinary subject work.
00:47:33
Speaker
It so is.
00:47:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:47:35
Speaker
So it actually takes, you know, all of it takes domain of knowledge.
00:47:39
Speaker
It takes a lot of these other frameworks and and synthesizes those things together and says, OK, rigorous tasks should have you learning with others.
00:47:48
Speaker
Right.
00:47:48
Speaker
And should rely on interdependence instead of independence.
00:47:52
Speaker
It should have a sense of audience.
00:47:54
Speaker
Right.
00:47:54
Speaker
So, right, the lowest form is going to be, right, just an audience of yourself or like a partner or the class.
00:48:00
Speaker
The highest one is like an audience I want to influence, right?
00:48:04
Speaker
There's an element of intellectual and emotional safety, right?
00:48:08
Speaker
In a low cognitive or a low rigorous task, those are not required.
00:48:13
Speaker
But in a highly rigorous task, right, those are expression of concepts or of recognized patterns or the expression of supported opinions of new ideas.
00:48:21
Speaker
So, it just gives us such a new,
00:48:24
Speaker
and powerful lens to look at that word rigor in education, not just through the tired, old, crappy blooms, but actually synthesizing what we actually know about rigorous work and drawing a line around there.
00:48:38
Speaker
So I really had to go back and reevaluate some of my own work around this.
00:48:42
Speaker
And what's funny is that a lot of progressive instruction and assessment practices are
00:48:47
Speaker
align more heavily on this route on the powerful task rubric for designing student work than traditional right test and forget methodologies that are considered more rigorous because you know what they stress students out more and more kids do poorly on them.
00:49:07
Speaker
But yeah, so that was really like both.
00:49:12
Speaker
validating, I suppose.
00:49:13
Speaker
And also, right, just gave this.
00:49:15
Speaker
So I brought this framework to the table and having those curriculum conversations and it has blooms, but we're going to look at some of these other things, too.
00:49:22
Speaker
Unbelievable to me that somebody making six figures as a curriculum director can't do better than Bloom's taxonomy.
00:49:28
Speaker
Give me a break.
00:49:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:30
Speaker
What's that one called again?
00:49:32
Speaker
Oh, that is called 17,000 Classroom Visits Can't Be Wrong.
00:49:37
Speaker
And I believe John Antonetti and I are mutuals on Twitter, too.
00:49:40
Speaker
So shout out to John.
00:49:42
Speaker
Your book's great.
00:49:42
Speaker
Get him on the podcast.
00:49:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's one of those things where it's like,
00:49:48
Speaker
do we reclaim the term or not?
00:49:50
Speaker
Like rigor, kind of like growth mindset, where it's like one of those things where originally it probably wasn't that problematic, and then the way it was co-opted and used, this is especially the case with Carol Dweck's work, became more and more problematic, and now there's like a pushback on using that term in a different way.
00:50:10
Speaker
I don't really have strong feelings one way or another on it.
00:50:12
Speaker
I just know that it is undeniable that the challenge of
00:50:19
Speaker
what you're tasked to do in a progressive ed classroom is more difficult.
00:50:23
Speaker
Free play, for example, in elementary school is way harder than a worksheet.
00:50:28
Speaker
It's way more cognitively demanding, and you're going to learn a lot more.
00:50:31
Speaker
So despite how some of these things might be perceived, the research is there.
00:50:38
Speaker
My number five is a crossover.
00:50:42
Speaker
My number five is The Schools Our Children's Deserve by Alfie Kohn.
00:50:48
Speaker
And it could really be any Alfie Cohn education book.
00:50:51
Speaker
Like, uh, yep.
00:50:52
Speaker
What's the, the one about no, no contest, which gets into like a standardized testing.
00:50:58
Speaker
Um, the, the case against, um, I can't remember the names of any of his books.
00:51:04
Speaker
The one that's like the case against like,
00:51:06
Speaker
phrase or whatever it is.
00:51:07
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:51:07
Speaker
Punished by rewards.
00:51:10
Speaker
Maybe is that what you're thinking by rewards?
00:51:12
Speaker
There's another one, too, that gets into.
00:51:13
Speaker
Or is that a different one?
00:51:15
Speaker
I can't remember.
00:51:15
Speaker
He's written a lot of stuff.
00:51:16
Speaker
Regardless, every Alfie Cohn book is pretty darn good.
00:51:19
Speaker
I think the schools our children's deserve and you've kind of already covered it, really.
00:51:22
Speaker
I think that that book is the most generalized and the one that best explains what progressive education is.
00:51:28
Speaker
This is one of the two books on my list that really got me into this kind of stuff.
00:51:32
Speaker
It was very much a stepping stone towards some more, I guess, intense work on progressive ed.
00:51:40
Speaker
But I think The Schools Our Children is Deserted by Alfie Cohn is just a classic.
00:51:43
Speaker
And since you already really spoke about it, I'll just leave it there.
00:51:46
Speaker
All right.
00:51:48
Speaker
Fork.
00:51:50
Speaker
So 4 for me is not a newer book.
00:51:54
Speaker
I think it came out about 2006, which the context for that is very interesting, right?
00:51:59
Speaker
So if we imagine we're, by 2006, we're half a decade into the No Child Left Behind experiment.
00:52:06
Speaker
You know, we're kind of in the midst of the
00:52:09
Speaker
And everything else that came along with it, right?
00:52:11
Speaker
The no excuses kind of charter schools movement and the expansion of all of that infrastructure across the country.
00:52:19
Speaker
And so this book is Jonathan Kozal's The Shame of the Nation, who, of course, you're speaking with for a podcast episode here in a couple of months, which is incredible.
00:52:30
Speaker
This is my number 11 or number 12.
00:52:30
Speaker
This was on my original list.
00:52:32
Speaker
OK, OK.
00:52:34
Speaker
And so I came late to the game.
00:52:36
Speaker
Right.
00:52:36
Speaker
I read this 10 years after it came out.
00:52:40
Speaker
And the subheader of that, the subtitle is the restoration of apartheid schooling in America.
00:52:45
Speaker
And Kozal's always been right on the on the forefront of showing what the life is like in schools for kids at the margins.
00:52:52
Speaker
And what was so striking about this book to me was just how.
00:52:59
Speaker
how he contrasts the schools that we justify giving to kids in low-performing schools.
00:53:08
Speaker
So those are ones attended primarily by low-income students, by black and brown communities, maybe by immigrant communities, et cetera.
00:53:16
Speaker
And
00:53:17
Speaker
justifying the discipline structures that are associated with them too, right?
00:53:21
Speaker
So you have the no excuses model that, I don't know if Kozal uses this language, but we would consider those things like a carceral pedagogy today.
00:53:30
Speaker
And I don't know if Kozal uses that language, but he says in that book, right?
00:53:34
Speaker
We know what good schools look like.
00:53:37
Speaker
We just give them to rich white people.
00:53:39
Speaker
And none of those people would stand a day putting their white kids in the kinds of buildings that we give to poor families, to black families and their children.
00:53:51
Speaker
And they would not stand a day for the kinds of discipline practices, exclusion, et cetera, that get lauded in that.
00:53:57
Speaker
And he has a lot of different case studies in there.
00:54:00
Speaker
And obviously, his is also very rooted in kind
00:54:03
Speaker
kind of that sociological ethnography.
00:54:08
Speaker
He visited a lot of these buildings.
00:54:09
Speaker
He's telling their stories.
00:54:11
Speaker
And it was just like a wake-up call to me in that context because I don't think I had read an author, a modern author, write about
00:54:20
Speaker
that apartheid schooling that that that would exist in in the 21st century.
00:54:26
Speaker
And of course, we know today that schools are more segregated now than they than they have been since.
00:54:31
Speaker
I think the peak was maybe the 1980s, you know, post Brown v. Board.
00:54:37
Speaker
And it's just been on a downhill slide since then.
00:54:39
Speaker
So, yeah, a great book kind of looking at the that structural, you know, the structure of schools and school funding and schooling conditions from Jonathan Kozal.
00:54:51
Speaker
One of the authors I'm about to mention actually connects with that really well because he also talks about apartheid schooling.
00:54:56
Speaker
Really quick, though, this is not the book, but the work of Jonathan Kozal, I think, is very much highlighted even further with Bill Ayers' recent work.
00:55:07
Speaker
You Can't Fire the Bad Ones, which is Bill Ayers and two other people whose names I'm blanking on right now.
00:55:13
Speaker
But it's 18.
00:55:14
Speaker
It's like one of those books where it's like 18 myths and like they have like number one myth and then they talk about it and then there's like 10 pages about that and why they debunk it.
00:55:22
Speaker
And it talks about
00:55:24
Speaker
One of the myths is specifically about this idea of we can't build better public schools because the fact of the matter is there are public schools that do this cool stuff.
00:55:33
Speaker
They're just for the rich kids.
00:55:35
Speaker
I remember on the podcast we did with Bill Ayers, he expressed frustration that all of the book bannings and censorship, and this was before...
00:55:43
Speaker
the more modern censorship.
00:55:45
Speaker
Uh, right.
00:55:46
Speaker
That only happens pretty much in public schools, the private schools, where all the rich kids go, they can read whatever they want and they have expansive libraries, but yet the, the poorer students, the poor young people who have to go to public school or choose to go even go to public school are stuck with all of this, uh,
00:56:04
Speaker
government slash conservative backlash.
00:56:08
Speaker
So yeah, it's interesting.
00:56:10
Speaker
So for my number four, I kind of cheated because I put multiple books on number four.
00:56:16
Speaker
And the reason is I feel like it doesn't really matter which one of these that you read.
00:56:21
Speaker
I just think that every progressive educator should read at least one of these kinds of books.
00:56:26
Speaker
And these are like critical pedagogy
00:56:29
Speaker
like deep dive books like the intense like things you would read for like a master's or doctoral uh classroom because it's probably not going to be introduced in undergraduate level course because they are quite intense so right i chose one book by each of these authors that i think is their best um at least from what i've read because each one of these people has like 20 books so this is it might be the best but you could read any of them it wouldn't matter
00:56:54
Speaker
So the first is On Critical Pedagogy by Henry Giroux, which is just like a modern critical pedagogy text.
00:57:00
Speaker
That's 2011, 2012.
00:57:02
Speaker
It is an intense read.
00:57:04
Speaker
That's like over 400 pages, I'm pretty sure.
00:57:07
Speaker
But you will understand critical pedagogy if you read that book.
00:57:10
Speaker
And it's one of those books where you have to read every paragraph over and over because like what in the world he's talking about.
00:57:15
Speaker
If you want more accessible Giroux, read his most recent book, which is The Pedagogy in the Age of Resistance, I believe is what it's called.
00:57:22
Speaker
That just came out this year.
00:57:22
Speaker
Yeah, I have that right now.
00:57:24
Speaker
That's a much more mainstream book, but it's not as deep.
00:57:29
Speaker
My second is Schooling as a Ritual Performance Toward a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures by Peter McLaren.
00:57:39
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:57:39
Speaker
That's all...
00:57:44
Speaker
So, you know, Peter McLaren's also in that like critical pedagogy world.
00:57:48
Speaker
This book very much gets into like the old school, like I think about like Baba type stuff of the sign, the signee, like assigning concepts to words and symbols and schools.
00:57:59
Speaker
This book specifically like catalogs and puts up tables of
00:58:03
Speaker
all of the things we do, and he doesn't describe it like this, but like the myths of objectivity.
00:58:08
Speaker
So things we do to fill out the checklist so we feel like we're doing something, but so much of what we do is just wasted time and just kind of like upholding the status quo.
00:58:18
Speaker
So in my opinion, that's the best book by him.
00:58:19
Speaker
And then the final one on this list is Culture and Power in the Classroom by Antonia Darter, who Antonia Darter is going to be on the podcast as well here pretty soon.
00:58:29
Speaker
Her work is primarily known for
00:58:32
Speaker
continuing the legacy of Paulo Ferreira.
00:58:34
Speaker
So Antonia Darter knew Paulo Ferreira and was kind of like one of his like proteges.
00:58:41
Speaker
She wrote, it's like Paulo Ferreira for the 21st century or something like that.
00:58:46
Speaker
In my opinion, culture and power in the classroom is the most interesting one.
00:58:50
Speaker
The sub header is educational foundations for the schooling of bicultural students.
00:58:55
Speaker
And specifically, this one dives into immigrant studies, ethnic studies, and educating immigrant youth.
00:59:05
Speaker
All of those authors, Giroux, McLaren, Darter, are all a lot more intense.
00:59:09
Speaker
Most of these books are quite long and heavy and very philosophical in language, but they teach you a lot about really deeply understanding this stuff.
00:59:17
Speaker
The only other author I think that's in this vein is Ira Shore.
00:59:21
Speaker
I own eight Irish or books.
00:59:23
Speaker
I think I've gotten through a total of 20 pages of all of them combined.
00:59:27
Speaker
I'm sure some people like Irish or I just find it deathly boring.
00:59:31
Speaker
That's saying something because I actually like Drew and Drew is a slow read.
00:59:35
Speaker
But but yeah, I think anyone like the deep critical pedagogy books is a must at some point in someone's career.
00:59:43
Speaker
Cool.
00:59:44
Speaker
Are we in the top three now?
00:59:47
Speaker
Oh, okay.
00:59:48
Speaker
Oh God, it's getting real intense.
00:59:50
Speaker
It's like if Doomguy did the narration of these things.
00:59:52
Speaker
Now, again, to come back to this idea, because I'm approaching it chronologically, this would be my number one best progressive education book.
01:00:02
Speaker
But in my timeline, it's number three, because there are a couple more in the last couple of years that are very recent since 2020 that I actually think are top reads.
01:00:10
Speaker
Interesting interpretation of a top 10 list, but that's okay.
01:00:14
Speaker
Well, you know, I just I wanted to put a different spin on it, you know, and I didn't want to pick ones that you would overlap with, too.
01:00:20
Speaker
So my number three is The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith.
01:00:26
Speaker
And I want to say it's so hard to nail down who recommended this to me.
01:00:31
Speaker
I want to say maybe Nate Babcock on Twitter, but it got so many recommendations.
01:00:36
Speaker
I couldn't ignore it anymore.
01:00:37
Speaker
They were like, what are you doing with your life?
01:00:39
Speaker
stop reading whatever you're doing and get a copy of this book.
01:00:42
Speaker
I think the other part of it too is like a lot of these books that aren't like methods books, they're hard to find.
01:00:49
Speaker
So it kind of feels a little bit like you're getting your hands on something that you're not supposed to.
01:00:55
Speaker
It's got kind of that subversive kind of occult feel.
01:00:59
Speaker
And so once I got it, this book is my most reread, my most highlighted, my most everything.
01:01:06
Speaker
There is...
01:01:08
Speaker
In my thinking about teaching and learning, there is a pre-Frank Smith and there is a post-Frank Smith where I read this book.
01:01:15
Speaker
And the big idea, the biggest idea, I think here, right, he tackles kind of that history of cognitive science and like, how do we measure learning?
01:01:22
Speaker
What is a unit of learning?
01:01:24
Speaker
And sort of the early studies that tried to nail those things down and, you know, where those shortcomings are.
01:01:29
Speaker
But then in a book that is all of 100 and, well, let's see, not even before the notes, but it's all of 100 pages before you even get to the notes.
01:01:39
Speaker
So it's a very short read, but it's very approachable as well.
01:01:43
Speaker
The biggest thing is this notion of like, we don't learn from the people that we are with or that we are around.
01:01:52
Speaker
We learn from the people that we identify with.
01:01:54
Speaker
And so that identity, he says, creates that opportunity for learning.
01:01:59
Speaker
And so, right, it really was a game changer for me in thinking, not so much of learning as lessons and cognitive management and classroom management, really identity management.
01:02:12
Speaker
Right.
01:02:12
Speaker
How do you get kids to identify as, you know, learners of a particular discipline or how do you get themselves to identify with a particular classroom culture?
01:02:21
Speaker
And he refers to these things as clubs.
01:02:23
Speaker
So he's like, you've got the club of readers.
01:02:25
Speaker
You've got the club of all of these things and they're going to identify and perform in different ways and they're going to wear clothes and they're going to, you know, do all those things that identify them as being inducted into the, you know, the the club of readers and learners and writers and communicators, et cetera.
01:02:41
Speaker
And you just build that identity over the course of your life.
01:02:44
Speaker
But he also says to that rather than be rejected, since we since human beings don't like rejection, we will reject those identities.
01:02:53
Speaker
So if we feel like we don't fit into the club of readers or social studies or, you know, like the various disciplinary silos, I'm not good at science.
01:03:01
Speaker
Well,
01:03:02
Speaker
What does that even mean, right?
01:03:04
Speaker
It means you don't identify in the ways of thinking that, you know, the club of science thinkers would do.
01:03:10
Speaker
So, right, I really refocused again all of my classroom practices around this idea, like, does this help
01:03:17
Speaker
bring students into the club that I'm trying to creating, or does it push students out, right?
01:03:23
Speaker
Does it help them identify as learners, as thinkers, as right, induct them into a disciplinary way of thinking, you know, like, or does it exclude them for X, Y, and Z reasons?
01:03:34
Speaker
And that concept is,
01:03:36
Speaker
was a game changer for me.
01:03:38
Speaker
And I've done some PD around that concept as it relates to, you know, grades and grading, because those send fixed and damaging messages, not just about our learning, about our identity that we, again, we choose to reject rather than be rejected by them.
01:03:53
Speaker
It's like that idea that you can't fire me.
01:03:56
Speaker
I quit.
01:03:56
Speaker
So kids, you know, disengage, disconnect from school, et cetera.
01:04:00
Speaker
This is the book that I could talk all day about.
01:04:01
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:03
Speaker
because it was such a game changer.
01:04:04
Speaker
So thank you to those on social media who recommended it to me.
01:04:07
Speaker
And I cannot recommend the book highly enough.
01:04:11
Speaker
Yeah, that's a book of learning and forgetting.
01:04:14
Speaker
That's a good book.
01:04:16
Speaker
I like that one as well.
01:04:17
Speaker
I probably put that in my top 25.
01:04:19
Speaker
I don't think I resonated with it as much as you, but I do see the importance of it as a work.
01:04:25
Speaker
I think that's a really good one.
01:04:28
Speaker
In my top three, my number three is probably like the Dark Horse book.
01:04:33
Speaker
Not because I don't think that it's a progressive education book.
01:04:35
Speaker
It definitely is.
01:04:36
Speaker
I just think this author has been overlooked.
01:04:40
Speaker
She's the person that both of us have connected with a lot.
01:04:45
Speaker
Who I think is just, if not more relevant than Alfie Cohn, just as much as relevant as Henry Giroux, even like Paulo Ferreira, like big names, but her work, I never hear anyone mention it.
01:04:59
Speaker
And she just came out the new book like last year and she continually, I know who you're talking about here.
01:05:04
Speaker
And that is, who do you think it is?
01:05:06
Speaker
Susan Engel.
01:05:07
Speaker
It is Susan Engel.
01:05:09
Speaker
So Susan Engel, I guess as a heads up, used to be on our board.
01:05:12
Speaker
But the only reason why she was on our board is that we reached out after reading this specific book and it blew my mind.
01:05:18
Speaker
That is The End of the Rainbow, How Educating for Happiness, Not Money, Would Transform Our Schools.
01:05:26
Speaker
When I first picked up this book, I picked it up on a whim from the library when I was just like going through the education like rack.
01:05:33
Speaker
And I was just like, oh, I've never seen this author before.
01:05:35
Speaker
I'm just going to grab this and read it.
01:05:37
Speaker
And I don't think I've ever been more engaged with a work before.
01:05:40
Speaker
I read it all in one sitting, and it's like 250 pages long.
01:05:43
Speaker
And everything is... So sometimes I think Alfie Cohn gets criticized for coming across as sarcastic or elitist because he's just very direct in his opinions.
01:05:58
Speaker
His mantra or his persona feels very much like if you're not doing this, you're doing something wrong.
01:06:05
Speaker
And it can kind of feel bad to read.
01:06:07
Speaker
And I think some of the folks that identify with Cohn can be a little bit too intense on classroom teachers while ignoring a lot of the structures that teachers have to navigate.
01:06:17
Speaker
Susan Engel to me is more approachable Alfie Cohn.
01:06:21
Speaker
I personally would recommend Susan Engel over Alfie Cohn if I were trying to get someone into progressive education.
01:06:27
Speaker
This book features that very research heavy stuff that you would find in an Alfie Cohn book.
01:06:35
Speaker
while being a little bit more narrative focused, but not in a fluffy way.
01:06:40
Speaker
It goes into Susan Engel's work as a child developmental psychologist.
01:06:43
Speaker
So she's done a lot of studies with her students that are the actual studies that she references.
01:06:49
Speaker
And specifically, The End of the Rainbow talks about our obsession with college and career readiness, about STEM education, about college prep, about AP classes, all of these things that would be considered that rat race.
01:07:04
Speaker
of the classroom.
01:07:06
Speaker
And she dives into all of the reasons why child developmental psychologists overwhelmingly say we should not be doing any of those things.
01:07:13
Speaker
Instead, we should just focus on making kids calm and content and having fun.
01:07:18
Speaker
And kids would learn not only the same, but more from being more relaxed and happy day to day.
01:07:26
Speaker
And you can kind of see the thorough line here between all of these books.
01:07:30
Speaker
I think a cornerstone of progressive education is understanding
01:07:33
Speaker
The connections between happiness and contentment and learning.
01:07:38
Speaker
Because for so many people, especially adults that aren't educators, folks that just like grew up within the education system, they've normalized the idea that sending your kids to school is a necessary evil.
01:07:49
Speaker
That when you go through the classroom, you're going to be bored to suck it up.
01:07:51
Speaker
You have to deal with it.
01:07:52
Speaker
You have to put yourself up by the bootstraps.
01:07:54
Speaker
And my argument would be no.
01:07:56
Speaker
Like that's not what education is supposed to be.
01:07:58
Speaker
It should be a place of wonder and joy and happiness and democratic action.
01:08:02
Speaker
Like I should want to go to school just like when I was in first grade, how I loved going to school.
01:08:08
Speaker
It should maintain that the entire way all the way.
01:08:10
Speaker
But seriously, this book is so good.
01:08:14
Speaker
It also gets into the debates around research.
01:08:18
Speaker
Susan Engel gets into a lot of debates with cognitive scientists, which are especially popular amongst more conservative or traditional educators that would argue that we should do more rote memorization, that we need the canon, that kids should sit down and learn something that's more effective.
01:08:33
Speaker
And she dives into like, yes, that works great in a lab setting, but no one actually wants to learn that environment in real life because humans are not lab rats.
01:08:42
Speaker
They learn very complex ways.
01:08:44
Speaker
And there's a lot of other things we need to consider, like the social and emotional side of things that matter.
01:08:50
Speaker
So if I were listening to this, if you have not read The End of the Rainbow, you need to read that book like tomorrow.
01:08:55
Speaker
That's a great book.
01:08:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:57
Speaker
In any of Susan's work.
01:08:58
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:59
Speaker
The conversations we had with her when she was on the board were just... She's another one too.
01:09:04
Speaker
She's such a great communicator and has so much intelligence and has such an ability to relate these complex ideas in such a relatable and powerful way.
01:09:19
Speaker
So it
01:09:19
Speaker
Yeah, so much appreciate, Susan.
01:09:21
Speaker
What's really interesting, too, is that the most recent wave, I was just talking to Jason Ablin about this yesterday when we were discussing his book for the podcast.
01:09:30
Speaker
The most recent wave of, you know, like cognitive neuroscience through like Mary Helen Imordino Yang is confirming those exact same things, right?
01:09:38
Speaker
That the facts very much do, in fact, care about your feelings in the sense of, you know, our feelings color the way that we perceive information and that we understand.
01:09:48
Speaker
You know, that it that the way learning and experience are encoded in our brains and like that notion of embodied cognition, you know, that we're not just brains and jars and measuring inputs and outputs, but that, you know, this the rest of our body and the way that we feel in the world actually has a huge impact on our ability to learn and the way that we recall information and how we put it into action.
01:10:10
Speaker
So, yeah, she's like ahead of her time on that work there.
01:10:14
Speaker
For sure.
01:10:17
Speaker
Number two.
01:10:18
Speaker
So this one is... This is the part where everybody skipped ahead just to hear this part.
01:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:10:23
Speaker
On the YouTube, it'll say the most watched part if we get any views at all.
01:10:27
Speaker
But...
01:10:28
Speaker
But this book is fascinating to me for a couple of reasons, because it's a book that was written pre-pandemic, came out about a month before the world collapsed.
01:10:37
Speaker
So I think a lot of people got their hands on it.
01:10:39
Speaker
I think I got my hands on it maybe in late March of 2020.
01:10:43
Speaker
This was my first pandemic read.
01:10:46
Speaker
That was like an actual hard read, not something that I'm just trying to distract myself from existential horror with, right?
01:10:53
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:54
Speaker
Because I was so excited to do this.
01:10:55
Speaker
Now, Kevin Gannon is somebody who, you know, we've we've talked with a lot for the podcast.
01:11:02
Speaker
He was up until recently teaching at Grandview College in Des Moines, very close to me.
01:11:08
Speaker
And so I was able to see him speak at an Iowa History Teachers Conference, obviously watched him in the documentary that he appeared in the 13th.
01:11:16
Speaker
You know, about incarceration and, you know, the prison industrial complex.
01:11:22
Speaker
And so I just resonated a lot with his work as a historian, right, as a critical theorist, you know, as an Iowan and all those things.
01:11:29
Speaker
And so when his book, Radical Hope, dropped in in 2020, this was this was a book, again, that was written pre pandemic, but that resonated with so many of the themes that we were then living through in the early part of the pandemic in 2020.
01:11:46
Speaker
One thing that I think has been really prescient about that message is especially via now Henry Giroux in the in the in the speech that he gave at our the keynote that he gave in our conference to restore humanity is echoing those same things.
01:11:58
Speaker
Right.
01:11:58
Speaker
Hope is hope is a platform for action as opposed to, you know, creating Kevin borrows from this this older he's like a Dutch pedagogue or something with this notion of the classrooms of death.
01:12:12
Speaker
And that connects maybe even back to I'm synthesizing it now, maybe with Frank Smith's those clubs.
01:12:16
Speaker
Are we creating classrooms of death, which in the early part of the pandemic, of course, certainly resonated.
01:12:23
Speaker
But it was that idea of like that necrosis that just like we can't do anything different, that we can't that that learners have to act and participate in certain ways.
01:12:32
Speaker
Or could we create the opposite things and and make classrooms that are generative of new ideas and new ways of being and new ways of learning and like all of those things.
01:12:41
Speaker
The other idea that Kevin Gannon's book here really gave to me too, because he situates the beginning of it and kind of his impetus for writing was seeing the protests in Charlottesville in 2017, right?
01:12:53
Speaker
The Unite the Right rally there, because he kind of frames it in that famous picture now where you have –
01:12:59
Speaker
You know, in that torch march that they had where they were, you know, chanting Jews will not replace us as they were marching to the Robert E. Lee statue there is the face of this of this this young man.
01:13:10
Speaker
And he's like screaming and shouting.
01:13:12
Speaker
He kind of became emblematic of of that whole march.
01:13:15
Speaker
Now, that's that man was a student at the University of Chicago.
01:13:20
Speaker
Nevada or like our campus in Reno, Nevada.
01:13:23
Speaker
All right.
01:13:24
Speaker
And his whole thing is like, how can you what good is an education?
01:13:28
Speaker
What good is a college education in particular?
01:13:31
Speaker
If you can go through that and proceed and make the decision to fly to Charlottesville and participate in a white nationalist rally.
01:13:39
Speaker
What is the point of that education?
01:13:41
Speaker
And really asking that question that I've asked a lot ever since, right, is what about our education is an inoculation against white supremacy and against white nationalism?
01:13:51
Speaker
And how do we make our classroom spaces and our classrooms?
01:13:54
Speaker
and our institutional structures, you know, geared towards, you know, like that, that de-radicalization.
01:14:00
Speaker
And I think now, again, pressing it in so many different ways and so important for, for another book that is 150 pages, just really packed so much of a, you know,
01:14:11
Speaker
you know, an emotional conceptual punch and really changed the whole way that I thought about things.
01:14:18
Speaker
And kind of ironic then that a year later in 2021, probably about the same time as when, you know, if you know my story of classroom teaching and the reasons that I left, it was teaching about the riot at Charlottesville that kind of landed me in hot water because, you know, I wasn't playing both sides of the white nationalists.
01:14:35
Speaker
I was showing them in their own words and I was showing the violence inherent in
01:14:40
Speaker
you know, their presence in a pluralistic society.
01:14:43
Speaker
And some people in my community took umbrage at that for some reason and started to.
01:14:49
Speaker
I wonder why, you know?
01:14:51
Speaker
Yeah, I wonder why.
01:14:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:53
Speaker
I asked my principal that same question.
01:14:54
Speaker
I was like, hey, you ever stop to think and maybe why?
01:14:57
Speaker
Maybe why the people are mad that I call the Nazis bad?
01:15:00
Speaker
Huh?
01:15:00
Speaker
What could their motivations and intentions be?
01:15:02
Speaker
So anyway, radical hope must read.
01:15:05
Speaker
Get your hands on it.
01:15:07
Speaker
All right.
01:15:07
Speaker
So there is we're on the same wavelength here.
01:15:10
Speaker
Because my number two is very similar.
01:15:12
Speaker
However, it came out a few decades earlier.
01:15:15
Speaker
So Paulo Freire is like, that's a household name in the critical pedagogy world.
01:15:24
Speaker
Which, fun fact, Henry Giroux coined the term.
01:15:28
Speaker
Critical pedagogy.
01:15:29
Speaker
Paulo Freire doesn't actually use that word, even though he's considered to be the founder of critical pedagogy.
01:15:33
Speaker
That blew my mind when we were doing the conference.
01:15:36
Speaker
But regardless, I think most people, this is not my pick.
01:15:40
Speaker
Most people think about pedagogy of the oppressed when they think of Paulo Freire.
01:15:45
Speaker
And I think when they think of pedagogy of the oppressed, they think about, I think it's chapter three is the chapter where it's like, you know, the teacher is the creator, the students, the producer.
01:15:54
Speaker
I don't remember the exact language, but it's like that big, like almost poetic style of binaries of someone producing and someone consuming.
01:16:03
Speaker
And I think that's a really powerful piece of the book.
01:16:05
Speaker
However, I don't really resonate with the most of the rest of that book.
01:16:09
Speaker
It's very much situated in the world of Paulo Freire of connecting with
01:16:14
Speaker
adult learners in Brazil, which is his origin story.
01:16:18
Speaker
I think the more applicable book and my favorite of the Paulo Freire books, and this is my number two, is Pedagogy of Hope.
01:16:25
Speaker
So speaking of radical hope, Pedagogy of Hope to me is the book that one, is needed more now than ever because the book is about putting a more optimistic spin on Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
01:16:40
Speaker
So if you've read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, you know that a lot of that book is about
01:16:44
Speaker
kind of the perils of the poor and the perils of those who do not have power.
01:16:48
Speaker
And it's Freire's argument for a critical, even though he doesn't call it that, a critical pedagogy where folks recognize and understand who has power so that they can equip themselves to have the tools toward kind of really overthrowing the ruling class is really what he's getting into.
01:17:05
Speaker
I mean, Freire is a Marxist.
01:17:07
Speaker
Now, a lot of that work is based on literacy.
01:17:12
Speaker
Freire is probably most well known for developing an adult literacy program so that folks had the wherewithal to navigate these waters.
01:17:22
Speaker
Importantly, not to be able to move up in society and become members of the ruling class, but to actually give the tools back to the people and convert into a new society.
01:17:33
Speaker
And this is like the part of the conversation where like the folks get freaked out because they're like, wait, what are you talking about?
01:17:38
Speaker
But the fact of the matter is, is that in my opinion, schooling should be about creating a better world, not preparing people for the world that exists.
01:17:46
Speaker
And to me, a better world is one without poverty.
01:17:49
Speaker
And that to me should be obvious, but it sadly is not.
01:17:52
Speaker
Because if you're going to eliminate poverty, you will have to take something from those that have all the power.
01:17:56
Speaker
It doesn't mean that you have to convert to like a communist society.
01:17:59
Speaker
It just means that you have to have a society that is more equal.
01:18:02
Speaker
The reason why Pedagogy of Hope is interesting is that it's written decades after Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
01:18:07
Speaker
I believe at this point Ferreira is living either in Europe or North America.
01:18:11
Speaker
I want to say he's living in the United States at this point because he was chased out of Brazil for his teachings.
01:18:16
Speaker
And it is a look back at Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
01:18:20
Speaker
So he revises a lot of the work that was in the original and puts more of a hopeful, optimistic twist on it.
01:18:27
Speaker
He talks about why this work is needed and
01:18:30
Speaker
And why progressive educators shouldn't give up.
01:18:32
Speaker
I mean, this was a guy who basically his life was destroyed.
01:18:36
Speaker
He was run out by the government for, for talking by like a super right wing authoritarian government for preaching these very socialist messages.
01:18:44
Speaker
And he was forced to flee and basically all of his programs collapsed and was not necessarily like a, not like a well-off guy.
01:18:52
Speaker
Sadly, progressive pedagogy doesn't make you a lot of money.
01:18:54
Speaker
So he wrote,
01:18:56
Speaker
pedagogy of hope to provide teachers with tools and ideas for incorporating this at the classroom level, what it looks like, why it's important.
01:19:04
Speaker
To me, this is one of those books that you go back to when you feel very cynical about education.
01:19:11
Speaker
Because I think another misnomer in this field is that everyone is upset all the time.
01:19:18
Speaker
This is true of progressive politics as well.
01:19:20
Speaker
where it feels like you're always fighting against something.
01:19:22
Speaker
It feels like you're always up against something and that hope can easily be lost.
01:19:27
Speaker
And Frere in his later works, also teachers as cultural workers, letters to the 12 letters of teachers, I think is what it's called.
Imagination and Hope in Education
01:19:36
Speaker
Talks a lot about how like the moment at which you have hope is the moment at which you have power and the best tool you have to fight back against something outside of wealth or outside of
01:19:47
Speaker
literacy or knowledge is the ability to imagine a different world, which is something that comes up a lot in Drew's work as well.
01:19:56
Speaker
And our ability to have that radical joy, as Hooks talks about, as well as Bettina Love, is your ultimate tool for combating against ideas.
01:20:05
Speaker
So all of that to say,
01:20:07
Speaker
uh, Pedagogy of Hope is a relatively short Paulo Freire book that has a lot of inspirational messages.
01:20:12
Speaker
It's also better translated, uh, than Pedagogy of the Oppressed that can feel a little heavy.
01:20:19
Speaker
Interesting.
01:20:20
Speaker
I have not read Pedagogy of Hope, so that'll have to be on my to-do list.
01:20:24
Speaker
All right, here it comes.
01:20:28
Speaker
Yeah.
01:20:30
Speaker
I hate it so much.
01:20:31
Speaker
All right.
01:20:31
Speaker
So my number one is almost more personal than the other ones, in part because, you know, my journey to progressive education also coincides with my becoming a parent.
01:20:47
Speaker
You know, my daughter was born in 2015, my son in 2018.
01:20:52
Speaker
And of course, you know, through throughout their lives and kind of seeing the connection of schools and parenting and, you know, my own growth as both a parent and an educator.
01:21:01
Speaker
When I picked up this book, it it it was almost a difficult read because in a lot of ways I see my own son as being one of the children who could perhaps be in this.
01:21:12
Speaker
You know, I've talked to Chris about him a lot, but my son is four and he he is a different kind of kid.
01:21:20
Speaker
You could say, you know, he's neurodivergent in a lot of different ways.
01:21:23
Speaker
He's formally diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder.
01:21:27
Speaker
He had developed in the last year some pretty striking hearing loss that we were able to take care of with surgery at the beginning of the summer.
01:21:35
Speaker
And, you know, throughout the course of all of that, they were just behavioral disorders.
01:21:39
Speaker
Things that that were incongruous with his ability to, you know, attend daycare with with other kids because of the other issues that, you know, the way that he brings in and processes information, his emotions, the physical world around him, you know, were all barriers to what the normal kids were doing.
01:21:58
Speaker
So through through a lot of work and, you know, physical therapy against surgeries, you know, meeting with consultants on that.
01:22:06
Speaker
I foresee his progression through formal schooling as one that will be difficult.
01:22:15
Speaker
I want to make a system that will recognize him, not for his behavioral excesses and regulation issues or how he interacts in a big, crowded, noisy, loud environment, but
01:22:31
Speaker
And so when I read Carla Shalabi's Troublemakers, the subtitle of which is...
01:22:39
Speaker
Let's see here.
01:22:40
Speaker
Lessons in freedom from young children at school really captures the story of, I believe it's four students.
01:22:48
Speaker
And Carla frames these through the lens of them being the canaries in the coal mine.
01:22:53
Speaker
If school is the coal mine, right?
01:22:55
Speaker
Like the canary in the coal mine analogy is if these kids aren't thriving, aren't surviving and thriving, then that does not bode well for other kids as well.
01:23:04
Speaker
They are.
01:23:06
Speaker
other students are harmed by the ways that we treat these kids at the margins too.
01:23:09
Speaker
And now I do want to just like read a little bit, not even from, uh, from the text itself from the forward, which was from Sarah, uh,
01:23:19
Speaker
Lawrence Lightfoot.
01:23:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:21
Speaker
So Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot.
01:23:23
Speaker
And the very first words of this book in the forwards, when you open it up, you get in here.
01:23:29
Speaker
Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot writes, we rarely hear the words freedom and love in our private conversations and public discourses on schooling, in our aspirations and hopes for our children's education, in our proposals and recommendations for school reform.
01:23:44
Speaker
In fact,
01:23:44
Speaker
These concepts embedded in theoretical propositions, in moral searching, or in empirical investigations are rarely on the tongues of educational researchers who examine the dynamics of teaching, trace the trajectories of child development, and explore the layers of school culture.
01:24:00
Speaker
In this educational era, resonating with the appeals for standards and standardization, driven by the requirements of accountability and evaluation,
01:24:08
Speaker
The words, metaphors, and images that come to our minds and haunt our public consciousness carry just the opposite meaning.
01:24:14
Speaker
They speak of uniformity and conformity, management and control of achievement and success as measured by narrow assessment tools and remote quantifiable metrics.
01:24:24
Speaker
And I'll fast forward here.
01:24:26
Speaker
She goes on, in our efforts to control and measure, in fact, we often confuse difference with deviance, illness with identity.
01:24:34
Speaker
We pathologize, exclude, and then label those children who do not fit the norm, who trouble the waters, who misbehave, and we reward the teachers who contain and squelch the troublemakers.
01:24:46
Speaker
And
01:24:47
Speaker
I read this book just in the last year and really that notion then of seeing the troublemakers not as school would traditionally have them isolated, framed, excluded from those processes, but recognizing that building systems that support those students are going to be systems that support all of them.
01:25:07
Speaker
And there's so much power in the stories that she tells because she it's basically an ethnography.
01:25:12
Speaker
She sat in and observed students in these classroom environments and, you know, did home visits with with their parents to see them in these different environments and really just saw these these students for the awesome kids that they were, but also for the ways that they deviated from that.
01:25:27
Speaker
So, again, it's hard not to.
01:25:29
Speaker
kind of get emotional and take that personally because, you know, my kid is going to be, you know, on the receiving end of of Shelby's, you know, perception in that he my four year old could be a kid in this text.
01:25:40
Speaker
And so really kind of making that a personal mission for myself to want to restructure schools in ways that can support him and other kids like him who don't fit into those molds.
01:25:52
Speaker
I mean, that's a fantastic book.
01:25:55
Speaker
I'm going to also put that at my number 11.
01:25:57
Speaker
I really like that book.
01:25:58
Speaker
And there's a lot of great, great stuff in there.
01:26:01
Speaker
It could fit in my top 10 quite easily.
01:26:02
Speaker
I just wasn't thinking about it.
01:26:03
Speaker
That's a great work.
01:26:06
Speaker
So to keep the pace going here as we hit the hour and a half mark.
01:26:09
Speaker
This is good content.
01:26:12
Speaker
Should have been top five.
01:26:15
Speaker
You could probably guess my number one book because I talk about this book
01:26:19
Speaker
Pretty much every time that we're in a meeting, I quote and or reference something from this book because it's impacted me more than anything else I've ever read, let alone an education book.
01:26:31
Speaker
It is the book that made me want to be a teacher or at least solidified it.
01:26:35
Speaker
And it's the book that is the cover yellow.
01:26:38
Speaker
The cover is it's yellow or green.
01:26:40
Speaker
I think depending on the edition, I can't remember which one's which the cover is yellow.
01:26:43
Speaker
Okay.
01:26:44
Speaker
All right.
01:26:45
Speaker
Just so.
01:26:47
Speaker
So that book is Teaching to Transgress, Education as the Practice of Freedom by Bell Hooks.
Progressive Education and Identity Politics
01:26:56
Speaker
To me, the best book ever written on progressive education that not only dives into the nature about what progressive education is, but is a modern interpretation of Paulo Freire, because Bell Hooks also was friends with Paulo Freire and did a lot of stuff based off of his work.
01:27:15
Speaker
It incorporates her experience of growing up in segregated classrooms and on anti-racist education.
01:27:22
Speaker
And it dives into kind of the modern difficulties of integrating progressive education in spaces that are inherently neoliberal and capitalist and very much against a lot of the things that would be best for kids.
01:27:40
Speaker
I went ahead and pulled up because you read a quote.
01:27:43
Speaker
I figured I'd pull up one of my quotes from this book.
01:27:47
Speaker
Hooks writes, when education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share or to confess.
01:27:56
Speaker
Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students.
01:28:00
Speaker
Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow and are empowered by the process.
01:28:07
Speaker
That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks.
01:28:13
Speaker
Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive.
01:28:22
Speaker
When professors...
01:28:23
Speaker
bring narratives, all of their experiences into classroom discussions.
01:28:27
Speaker
It eliminates the possibility that we can function as all knowing, silent and arrogant.
01:28:32
Speaker
And Hooks brings in so many ideas about like not being neutral, about recognizing the myth of objectivity, about diving into why it's important that we think about our race and class, gender identity, disability, and all of the work that we do.
01:28:50
Speaker
I think a very valid criticism
01:28:53
Speaker
of a lot of books that are popular on progressive education.
01:28:56
Speaker
So not like your jerroos and stuff.
01:28:57
Speaker
Like I'm thinking like Cohn's work to even like, kind of like a little more mainstream, like Dintersmith or Wagner is that they don't talk a lot about anti-racist education, about gender and gender identity, about disability.
01:29:13
Speaker
They don't bring up a lot about identity politics, which is a necessary thing to investigate in a public school system where there's
01:29:22
Speaker
All of the things that we're talking about, but especially like Ozil and Hooks and Giroux and Darter are recognizing the fact that, again, the schools that are incorporating all these ideas are inherently those that have political power.
01:29:37
Speaker
Those for rich white kids that are capable of having the cool progressive schools.
01:29:42
Speaker
One of the things that bothers me a lot about doing the work that we do at HRP is that
01:29:47
Speaker
The schools that are easy for us to get into, for the most part, to do professional development that are recognizing this cool stuff, are schools that cost $30,000 a year to go to.
01:29:57
Speaker
It's not the schools that are struggling to have budgets or that struggle with all of the different government regulations that have been placed on them for failing their school report card.
01:30:08
Speaker
They're not going to bring in folks like us to do cool work because they're worried about rumorization and keeping up.
01:30:14
Speaker
So to me, Teaching Transgress is a book about hope.
01:30:18
Speaker
It's a book about understanding how to teach.
01:30:21
Speaker
And to me, it's the validity factor.
01:30:24
Speaker
When I read that book, I think that what I'm doing is right and I'm not a crazy person.
01:30:30
Speaker
Because there were many times in my teaching career where I would walk in every day and I'd be like,
01:30:35
Speaker
Like, am I just doing this all wrong?
01:30:36
Speaker
Because it doesn't feel right.
01:30:38
Speaker
It feels like I'm like messing up or this is too chaotic.
01:30:41
Speaker
It's too weird.
01:30:42
Speaker
I'm being too open.
01:30:43
Speaker
And that book really, really nailed it for me.
01:30:47
Speaker
Teaching community, teaching for community, I think is just as good.
01:30:51
Speaker
I think that teaching a transgressor is slightly more applicable for day to day practice, but they're both great
Influential Books and Critiques of Traditional Education
01:30:58
Speaker
books.
01:30:58
Speaker
And the same with all like bell hooks, like feminist work, I think was very powerful for me understanding and kind of dissecting what that means.
01:31:05
Speaker
um yeah i can't recommend bell hooks is my favorite author so i can't recommend it enough uh yeah that's my that's my top 10 we don't do very quickly honorable mentions we can do honorable mentions we've we've made a full feature length film out of this out of this episode so um i have uh one of my honorable mentions uh is gonna be cornealist's miners we got this that's also one of mine that was on my list okay honorable
01:31:30
Speaker
Because he he he wraps up all of it's like everything that we've talked about in all of these other books, but presented like aesthetically.
01:31:39
Speaker
It is is is so so cool and so useful.
01:31:42
Speaker
I mean, it really just fits with his understanding and his experiences of the world kind of in that that comic book format.
01:31:50
Speaker
And you can you can see just how many of these little tabs I have in Freire and Hooks into that book.
01:31:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's exactly it.
01:31:57
Speaker
And but but the tabs are because he has so much useful stuff.
01:32:02
Speaker
It's just like these really useful diagrams that you could make photocopies of these these organizers and protocols.
01:32:09
Speaker
It's just such a useful operational, you know, book to implement these practices like.
01:32:16
Speaker
It's culturally responsive teaching.
01:32:18
Speaker
It's like all of those those theoretic academic concepts, which is like, hey, here's how you actually do that in your classrooms with kids.
01:32:27
Speaker
So that's that's great.
01:32:28
Speaker
Oh, sorry.
01:32:29
Speaker
I'm flying through.
01:32:30
Speaker
I'm going to cut you off.
01:32:31
Speaker
My next one would be Excellent Sheep by William Dureshowitz.
01:32:34
Speaker
It was the book I always handed to kids.
01:32:37
Speaker
That's the book that tells – he's a Yale professor that talks about why we shouldn't be on the – I think he calls it zombification process where you just go like next step education.
01:32:49
Speaker
You go through middle school and high school and you go to college and then you do this and then you do this.
01:32:52
Speaker
And then you hope that you get a good job.
01:32:53
Speaker
And then along the way, all that purpose finding is lost.
01:32:56
Speaker
which I'm just going to toss it in here right now.
01:32:57
Speaker
My next book on the list was The Path to Purpose by William Damon that outlines all that purpose-finding research.
01:33:03
Speaker
To me, those two books go hand in hand.
01:33:05
Speaker
One more that's also in those kind of list of three books is Frank Bruni's Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be, which is talking about, that's a book about all of the people that have gone to state schools or community colleges or whatever that might be,
01:33:21
Speaker
And have been just as successful as though people like it and do elite colleges to me.
01:33:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:33:25
Speaker
I used to teach, uh, when I taught, uh, students in history, we used to have like an education type unit whenever kids wanted to do it.
01:33:33
Speaker
And I would pull excerpts from Dreschowitz, Bruni, and, um, uh, the other one I was just talking about that I'm blanking on right now.
01:33:40
Speaker
I pull all three of those together, uh, and talk about, uh,
01:33:44
Speaker
Like, what does it mean to go to college?
01:33:47
Speaker
And like, does it matter where you get into?
01:33:49
Speaker
And the thesis behind all of that is it doesn't.
01:33:51
Speaker
It doesn't matter where you go because it's all about connections anyway.
01:33:54
Speaker
Like if you're rich and you can afford to get into Yale, the reason why you tend to be more successful is that you already have connections because you were at Yale, not because you necessarily have that better of an education.
01:34:04
Speaker
Okay.
01:34:06
Speaker
Can I have two more honorable mentions?
01:34:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:34:08
Speaker
Because I wasn't sure.
01:34:09
Speaker
I just connected a bunch of them.
01:34:11
Speaker
I wasn't sure where to include this, but it was just so formative, again, in my early college experience.
01:34:18
Speaker
And I associate this book, I probably talked about this before, but with the professor that I had who taught this class.
01:34:24
Speaker
So it was for an African-American history class taught by the late Professor Baskerville, who his and I relationship was really great being between undergrad and a college professor.
01:34:39
Speaker
But he was really encouraging.
01:34:41
Speaker
you know, developing my thinking and, and pushing my thinking on these topics too.
01:34:45
Speaker
But, um, I, I remember reading James Baldwin's the fire next time.
01:34:48
Speaker
And it's a book that I probably read three or four.
01:34:50
Speaker
Is it okay.
01:34:51
Speaker
And it's not an education book, right?
01:34:53
Speaker
It's not a book about, it's not about pedagogy.
01:34:55
Speaker
It's not about this, but it's about his educational experiences and his experiences just growing up as a black gay man in the United States.
01:35:03
Speaker
And it's so, um, informative in, um,
01:35:07
Speaker
And so powerful in such a small, you could sit down and read it in one sitting before bed, which I think is what I did the first time I went through it.
01:35:15
Speaker
But yeah, just there's not anybody I think who can touch the prose of Baldwin and the impact that his words have.
01:35:22
Speaker
So it's like, there's always a bit of my thinking that has kind of Baldwin's experiences via this text in here too.
01:35:29
Speaker
And one more.
01:35:30
Speaker
then would be John Dewey's Democracy and Education.
01:35:34
Speaker
I mean, probably like the founding text of progressive education would be like Dewey's work.
01:35:41
Speaker
And it's dense.
01:35:42
Speaker
I have not read this whole book.
01:35:44
Speaker
I've read parts of all of the pieces of it to kind of synthesize it.
01:35:49
Speaker
But he was one who really was doing laying that foundation for thinking of exactly that.
01:35:54
Speaker
Like, what is the purpose of education?
01:35:56
Speaker
What's the purpose of education?
01:35:58
Speaker
to create citizens?
01:35:59
Speaker
What is the role of education in a democratic society, democratic system, you know, in a time where it was anything but, but yeah, just informing, you know, there's still lessons that you can learn going back to his own words, but obviously his impact and his legacy is
01:36:15
Speaker
you know, can't be is isn't matched by, you know, probably anybody other than, you know, the freres and the hooks is of the of the critical pedagogy world.
01:36:24
Speaker
What else you got?
01:36:24
Speaker
I'm done.
01:36:26
Speaker
I got three more quick ones.
01:36:28
Speaker
Two of them were kind of in that same like the fire next time type of vibe.
01:36:32
Speaker
Uh, getting into like carceral pedagogy.
01:36:35
Speaker
One would be the recently released.
01:36:36
Speaker
They do that.
01:36:37
Speaker
We do this till they free us by Kaba.
01:36:40
Speaker
Oh yeah.
01:36:41
Speaker
Um, which isn't necessarily an education book, but certainly the carceral stuff goes into the education world and being aware of that helps you combat that in your classroom.
01:36:50
Speaker
It's a very well-written book.
01:36:52
Speaker
The other one, which is an education book is we want to do more than survive, uh, by Bettina love, which is kind of like the educational version of that same thing.
01:37:00
Speaker
Uh, I,
01:37:03
Speaker
I love that book as well.
01:37:04
Speaker
I considered putting it in the top 10.
01:37:05
Speaker
I just wasn't really sure where to put it and I wanted to throw in my kind of like weird picks at the beginning.
01:37:10
Speaker
So it would probably be up in the top 10 if I didn't put those in there.
01:37:14
Speaker
The only other book, which is, it's kind of in relation to the Carla Chalabi book where it's like one of those things where
01:37:22
Speaker
I don't have kids, but if I did, I would hope that educators read this book because it reflects my experience in school, which is Quiet by Susan Cain.
Inclusivity and Diversity in Educational Spaces
01:37:31
Speaker
I know that's like a pop sci book that used to be really popular like five to 10 years ago.
01:37:37
Speaker
Everyone was reading that in regards to like, it's not an education book, but it's also just more like a fun read, but it talks about why the world is very much built
01:37:47
Speaker
for extroverted thinking.
01:37:49
Speaker
And it dives a lot in the classrooms and teaching where it seems like the more elite of the school you go to, the more they focus on public speaking and group work and like really intensive extroverted conversations.
01:38:04
Speaker
And I find a lot of connections there to one to myself because I was always a very quiet person.
01:38:09
Speaker
I still am.
01:38:10
Speaker
I am not the kind of person that likes to do small talk and just constantly like present.
01:38:14
Speaker
It's just not my thing despite doing an hour and 40 minute long podcast.
01:38:18
Speaker
I don't like talking.
01:38:19
Speaker
Yeah, right.
01:38:35
Speaker
And some of the most intelligent, best perspectives I've ever got on education have been from people who don't communicate through word.
01:38:44
Speaker
They don't communicate by speaking.
01:38:47
Speaker
They write everything out or they present things in different ways.
01:38:51
Speaker
And again, if we're going to build a culture where it's a better future as opposed to the world that we're building right now, we should allow people to present things in different ways that they can build those structures down the road.
01:39:02
Speaker
That doesn't mean that we can't acknowledge the existing issues and prepare people for those problems.
01:39:08
Speaker
It doesn't mean we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
01:39:12
Speaker
But we can do two things at once.
01:39:13
Speaker
We can chuckle those concepts.
01:39:16
Speaker
So that's my list.
01:39:17
Speaker
There's just...
01:39:19
Speaker
There's so much connection to the work that we've done with HRP and then tried to export and tried in our classrooms as well, like the digital pedagogy, hosting an online conference on Discord for exactly those reasons as well, because good digital pedagogy is accessible to everyone.
01:39:36
Speaker
You can communicate on voice and through video.
01:39:39
Speaker
You can communicate via text.
01:39:41
Speaker
And some people only communicate in one form or the other.
01:39:45
Speaker
you know, are pushed out for like multimodal literacy and trying to reach people in different spaces that aren't just, you know, text based or through academic articles.
01:39:53
Speaker
Like, I think I think maybe that is a little bit ahead of its time and thinking of, OK, like if we if we know better, how do we do better on actually making learning spaces for kids and adults, you know, more accessible and yeah, just an increased participation for people from a variety of modalities like that's a no brainer.
01:40:13
Speaker
That's kind of like an irony behind doing a top 10 list for books because I completely recognize that a lot of folks that are educators don't like reading books like this.
01:40:23
Speaker
You could listen to them.
01:40:24
Speaker
You could listen to them.
01:40:25
Speaker
You could watch YouTubers cover them.
01:40:27
Speaker
I'm sure there's a lot of different things you could do.
01:40:29
Speaker
You could listen to our podcast where we bring up a lot of these themes.
01:40:32
Speaker
But the
01:40:34
Speaker
I think the final thing I would say, final closing thought would be that the purpose of lists like this, and I think this is something that a lot of folks in this sphere get caught up in and it's a trap.
01:40:43
Speaker
And it's just true of every like niche.
01:40:46
Speaker
It's not even niche, but like something that's a little more specialized is gatekeeping information or believing that like you should gatekeep progressive ed.
01:40:53
Speaker
Like, oh, if you haven't read bell hooks, then you can't call yourself a progressive educator.
01:40:57
Speaker
Because there are so many different times where like,
01:41:00
Speaker
we'll be talking to folks and I'll be like, you won't believe it.
01:41:02
Speaker
We got Henry Giroux to present at our conference.
01:41:04
Speaker
And they're like, who's Henry Giroux?
01:41:05
Speaker
And I'm sitting there like the dude's written like 70 books on progressive education.
01:41:09
Speaker
How do you not know who he is?
01:41:10
Speaker
There's a lot of people that don't know like this kind of stuff.
01:41:14
Speaker
I've only read kind of like you.
01:41:16
Speaker
I think I've only read like 20 pages of Dewey because I can't stand it.
01:41:19
Speaker
It's so boring.
01:41:20
Speaker
But like I understand the impact of like his work and like I'm probably missing things out there.
01:41:26
Speaker
I didn't read Maria Montessori until a few years ago.
01:41:30
Speaker
And I know how much of an impact she had on education.
01:41:32
Speaker
So I think it's important to recognize that there's a lot of information out there that folks aren't exposed to or don't want to be exposed to yet.
01:41:39
Speaker
That doesn't necessarily mean that they're not a real progressive educator, whatever that means.
01:41:45
Speaker
Yeah, maybe that was a little bit of my rationale.
01:41:47
Speaker
behind presenting that journey too.
01:41:50
Speaker
It's not like we all go through the same education program and come out having read all of those same texts, particularly if they're aligned with the values of progressive education.
01:42:00
Speaker
We're all kind of finding our own turning points and our own texts that resonate with us and our practice and kind of building that plane as it's flying.
01:42:10
Speaker
So yeah, we're all on our own journey and I would love to see people share their own
01:42:15
Speaker
their own top five or top 10 lists with us in comments or on social media and stuff, just to kind of see what blind spots did we have?
01:42:24
Speaker
What did we miss out on?
01:42:25
Speaker
What should we be reading, too?
01:42:27
Speaker
Because, you know, obviously, there's only so much time for us to have read up to this point.
01:42:35
Speaker
So we couldn't have...
01:42:36
Speaker
gotten to everything yet so give us some new recommendations give us some things that we can read and review and and cover in the future but obviously if you if you've listened this far you're uh you're a super fan anyway so thanks for sticking around awesome well thanks for listening everybody we'll do another one again soon maybe we'll do top 10 educational games i don't know we'll find out okay bye