Transcript
Speaker: Hello, and welcome to our first installment of Mind Food, a series of more casual content that's easily digestible.
Speaker: This episode is brought to you by Anna Wendlandt, Rivka Ocho, and Alexander Gruber.
Speaker: Today, we're looking at the top 10 books that every progressive educator should read.
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.
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.
Speaker: Before we get started, Nick, is there anything you want to want to say?
Speaker: I got nothing.
Speaker: Let's get to it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So here we go.
Speaker: Top 10 books that every progressive educator should read.
Speaker: I hate it so much.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So my I decided to organize my top 10 list kind of like in chronology.
Speaker: So kind of tracking my journey into progressive education.
Speaker: And for me, that really starts.
Speaker: The more that I unpack that, for me, that really starts in my history, social science methods classes.
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.
Speaker: This one is from the recently past now, James Lowen.
Speaker: There were two books that I had to read of James Lowen's in my college methods courses.
Speaker: One probably is maybe fit for a more general audience.
Speaker: And of course, that is Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Speaker: And the title today, I think, would be like very clickbaity, right?
Speaker: But for me, it was...
Speaker: it was kind of like one of those epiphanies or a revelation, right?
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,
Speaker: define our both our past, our present and our future.
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.
Speaker: Have you ever heard of this book, Chris?
Speaker: I don't know that one.
Speaker: It's actually it's not from James Lowen.
Speaker: Dang it.
Speaker: It's actually from Kenneth.
Speaker: Good start.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Great.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: I thought they were both from James Lowen.
Speaker: I remember reading them at the same time.
Speaker: So so maybe that's where the streams got crossed.
Speaker: But it's it's in that same vein, but it's really a.
Speaker: a geographic history of the way that we tell those national myths and stories through monuments, right?
Speaker: And the myth making around those.
Speaker: So, right.
Speaker: How do we, the subtitle of it is America's landscapes of violence and tragedy.
Speaker: And it really is how we build into the,
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.
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
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?
Speaker: You know, what do we do with the artifacts in the British Museum?
Speaker: You know, how do we kind of commemorate those things in those spaces?
Speaker: So those two books probably are like more
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.
Speaker: So what do you got?
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: Because I was, I think I originally wanted to be an English teacher.
Speaker: And then I swapped after I started diving into those books because they're really accessible for kids.
Speaker: And, uh, yeah, it's just, it's, it's very well written and very easy to understand.
Speaker: I have no idea what that other book is, but I'll have to check it out.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: So, all right, you're up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So my list is arranged slightly differently.
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 might differ.
Speaker: They're all from my perspective, but I think these are going to stand out a lot more.
Speaker: And then the rest of them, I think, are just good books in general that everyone should check out.
Speaker: So
Speaker: My number 10 is something that we're incorporating into our upcoming conference.
Speaker: And Nick has been seeing me screenshot probably 300 pages of this book because it blows my mind every time I turn the page.
Speaker: And I'm like, man, this connects so much to everything that we talk about.
Speaker: And that is Designing Games, a Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tienen Sylvester.
Speaker: So this is not an education book.
Speaker: This is actually a textbook about designing video games.
Speaker: But the book dives into educational philosophy on pretty much every page.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: It's very popular.
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.
Speaker: You just kind of do your thing, and you play within this game world, almost like toys.
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.
Speaker: And every time I read one of these books, but especially this one,
Speaker: I'm shocked at how much it connects to how we learn in the classroom.
Speaker: James Paul Gee, the guy who did a lot of video game writing and connecting it to education, I think was kind of
Speaker: the prelude to this.
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.
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.
Speaker: There are a couple of decades old by now.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So this book gets a lot more into like, why is it that, you know, a kid will pick up
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?
Speaker: Why are they having fun even though they're failing?
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?
Speaker: Like a little dialogue box will pop up and say, hit A to jump and do this to do this.
Speaker: And then you forget about it versus games that teach you experientially.
Speaker: Or they just present you with a gap and then you have to jump over it and you have to figure it out.
Speaker: There are just so many parallels when you're reading this book.
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.
Speaker: So yeah, my number 10, Designing Games, a Guide to Engineering Experiences by Tina Sylvester.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we've even had on game designers.
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.
Speaker: And you as a game designer have to teach the player how to play the game or set up the
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: So it really is, it's like a lesson in that self-determination theory, right?
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.
Speaker: So
Speaker: And since that conversation, I've been pretty staunchly on the camp of like, educators can learn a lot from game designers.
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?
Speaker: Box systems and those kinds of things, mobile games.
Speaker: But yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker: I have not read that one, but I did read James Paul.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The virtual Skinner boxes.
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.
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?
Speaker: Is it rotting their brain or, you know, whatever it might be.
Speaker: 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.
Speaker: And a kid who's playing Minecraft is navigating an incredibly complex game with
Speaker: Many, many, many systems.
Speaker: And I think there's a lot to be learned from not only how is that designed, but how is the information presented?
Speaker: How is the player continually wanting to do it?
Speaker: And how are they engaged in it?
Speaker: Because obviously that game is enjoyed by millions upon millions of kids, even kids who are very young.
Speaker: And they are understanding it quite well.
Speaker: So there's definitely something there.
Speaker: I hate it so much.
Speaker: Okay.
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.
Speaker: So, um, coming out of the college methods classes, right.
Speaker: Thinking about history, thinking about teaching history, um,
Speaker: And then going into like 2012, fast forward a few years here.
Speaker: So the context here for me is I'm just about to start my, you know, my first full time teaching job.
Speaker: I'm working at a cemetery.
Speaker: I was a groundskeeper at a cemetery over the summer before then.
Speaker: And every day I would come home, you know, obviously tired.
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.
Speaker: We had this
Speaker: Comfy futon.
Speaker: And every day after I came home, I'd just come curl up on the futon and I'd read a book.
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.
Speaker: And I think for me, I...
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was just drawn to the title, right?
Speaker: Like just because, you know, just being in that vein anyway, like, oh, hey, teaching, what does this have to offer?
Speaker: And then realizing that this book came out, I think in the 1970s, 1971.
Speaker: I mean, so it's decades old now, but it reads like it could have come out yesterday.
Speaker: just in terms of Postman's perspective on what schools could be.
Speaker: His book was the original version of that, of the Dintersmiths, of the reimagined education.
Speaker: And frankly, there's been very little innovation on that theme since.
Speaker: We're rehashing Postman's ideas in all of this.
Speaker: He's kind of the original one there.
Speaker: But the thing that really stuck with me is just the way that he –
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.
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.
Speaker: So, um,
Speaker: Yeah, that has been a book that has just kind of stuck with me.
Speaker: And I've even gone back to it a couple more times just to refresh my memory every now and then.
Speaker: And it is just striking how recent it sounds and how radical his ideas still even are today.
Speaker: So
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that's a great book.
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.
Speaker: But I think that they that book is definitely solid.
Speaker: That's definitely on my my bookshelf of must reads.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So moving into my number nine, this is my last like
Speaker: fringe one.
Speaker: The rest of them are a lot more mainstream progressive.
Speaker: This is, yeah, this is the book that surprised me the most.
Speaker: And it's, it's very fringe when I picked it up.
Speaker: And it,
Speaker: I actually reviewed this as an education book, even though it's not published as one.
Speaker: It's a book called Manufacturing Happy Citizens by Edgar Kambadas and Eva Ayus, I believe is how you pronounce it.
Speaker: And the subtitle is How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives.
Speaker: So this book outlines the growth of the happiness movement, which you see a lot in corporate America, especially.
Speaker: And it traces back the research and funding of happiness studies.
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.
Speaker: And
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.
Speaker: So the systemic issue of corporate exploitations there with a band-aid of happiness research.
Speaker: And they take it one step further by highlighting how
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.
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.
Speaker: But in this case, the science around happiness research is skewed the other direction.
Speaker: the quote-unquote like real studies that highlight the issues with these apps, the issues with
Speaker: these programs kind of get buried because we live in a society that values money over all else.
Speaker: The reason why I think this matters as an education book, however, is that it talks a lot about SEL and mindfulness.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Speaker: Like, why do we need to apply a Band-Aid fix?
Speaker: The
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.
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.
Speaker: But until those underlying issues are solved, you're just working like Sisyphus.
Speaker: You need something to change that overall idea.
Speaker: But yeah, this book blew my mind.
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.
Speaker: That's my number nine.
Speaker: The through line through this, right, is like that individualization of systemic problems.
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
Speaker: parents are under, especially as working parents and trying to balance their child's activities and their family with their work-life balance.
Speaker: All of those things combined to produce people that are generally angsty, anxious, and unhappy.
Speaker: And there is a cottage industry in managing your own mental health and managing your happiness.
Speaker: And while that is certainly part of it, I think a lot of
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.
Speaker: The problem exists in the world, not in the individual.
Speaker: And, yeah, the through line through education there is, well, we do a lot of the same stuff in education, right?
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.
Speaker: That's a good one.
Speaker: I haven't read that one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Two quick things about it.
Speaker: One, it definitely covers the corporization of the happiness industry.
Speaker: Like, why is it that we need to feel like we are happy all the time?
Speaker: Why can't we just be content?
Speaker: And why can't we normalize the fact that sometimes it's okay to be sad and depressed?
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.
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.
Speaker: So like the perfect example of adding on something that makes no sense.
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.
Speaker: Uh, so the, the irony is, is just, is this there?
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: They only get more intense as time goes on.
Speaker: It makes me feel, yeah.
Speaker: It's like I got a kill streak in CS go or something is what this is.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So right.
Speaker: Number eight.
Speaker: Well, okay.
Speaker: So continuing in my trajectory, I want to say, um, you know, it was around the same time.
Speaker: So 2012 is what I would have encountered, um, postman for the first time.
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.
Speaker: And then sometime in the early 20 teens encountering Star Saxton's Hacking Assessment.
Speaker: And this was the first book that I had ever approached that even broached the idea of gradeless learning or going gradeless.
Speaker: And
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: How to structure things differently.
Speaker: And this actually led to practical.
Speaker: So like whereas Postman and some of the other books I'm talking about here kind of lead to those theoretical changes.
Speaker: Saxton's book was what I needed to be like, OK, how do I do this in practice?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: How can I put Postman's vision, which I, again, had no concept of progressive education at the time into practice?
Speaker: And in Saxton's book gives you that language and some of those tools.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: For feedback, for portfolios, for student driven conferences, for project based learning and kind of broke my paradigm of.
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.
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.
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?
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
Speaker: working in the various self-grading tools and all those things that Star Saxion gave.
Speaker: So a couple of years ago, we actually did a summit with Star.
Speaker: We've since talked with her on a lot of issues.
Speaker: And it's just really been coming full circle.
Speaker: Those conversations just give me so much joy to know that she is still doing that work.
Speaker: I think she might even have a new updated edition of Hacking Assessment coming out.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: in the next year.
Speaker: I don't know exactly when, but I remember talking to her about that a couple months ago.
Speaker: So, yep, that has to be on any progressive educators reading list.
Speaker: Yeah, I didn't even, apologies to Star Saxe, I didn't even think of that book.
Speaker: I don't know if I would have put it in my top 10, but it would be pretty close.
Speaker: That's a very strong book.
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.
Speaker: All right, so my number eight is the arguably fringe one, but I don't think it should be fringe.
Speaker: So the other two, like I get, like why you might look at those and go like, that's not progressive ed book.
Speaker: I think this is a progressive ed book, and it's just something that we don't talk often enough about.
Speaker: And it's the weird system on the 20 systems diagram of HRP of actions towards systemic change.
Speaker: The one that everyone's like, why is that in there?
Speaker: I know exactly what this is going to be.
Speaker: So...
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.
Speaker: And typically, unless you go to a pretty well-funded school, the lunch kind of sucks.
Speaker: You might have an option for a few like fried options.
Speaker: I remember kids would eat like potato chips every day and pizza because they didn't want to touch the food.
Speaker: Anyways, all of this to say,
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.
Speaker: So this remains my, not only one of my favorite books on progressive ed,
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.
Speaker: So like two, maybe three years ago, we had Jennifer on.
Speaker: And this book blew my mind.
Speaker: So this book is about tracing the history of the lunchroom back to the very beginnings of public school in the United States.
Speaker: So way back in the early 1900s and how lunch worked, tracing it through both when it was like locally sourced and like
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
Speaker: essentially can provide food services through cheaper means, arguably, through like these really extended contracts.
Speaker: Basically, you're buying in bulk.
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.
Speaker: Now, what's interesting is, and the reason why it blew my mind,
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.
Speaker: It's far cheaper, like 60 cents on a dollar.
Speaker: The organization that you would learn more about this from would be Chef Anne Foundation, who...
Speaker: If Chef Anne Foundation's ever listening to this, I want to have you on the podcast because you never respond.
Speaker: But Chef Anne Foundation's an awesome org that's mentioned multiple times in this book.
Speaker: They work with schools to bring about farm-to-table meals.
Speaker: And there are numerous reasons why this is important.
Speaker: One, it's cheaper.
Speaker: But two, it's healthier.
Speaker: And the kids actually want to eat the food.
Speaker: And there's an argument there for why...
Speaker: are we not treating lunch like it's part of the school day?
Speaker: And I don't mean like make a curriculum out of it.
Speaker: I mean, learn experientially by having lunch.
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.
Speaker: I never saw that.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
Speaker: So his thesis is, America wants to invade everywhere.
Speaker: Why don't we invade places like France in order to steal their free healthcare or Italy for their massive long vacation days?
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.
Speaker: They're eating like charcuterie boards and like salmon for lunch.
Speaker: And the idea is, one, kids learn table manners because they use real silverware and they sit at the table all together.
Speaker: So they're like learning how to eat properly.
Speaker: I mean, it is France.
Speaker: Two, they have a very balanced nutritional diet.
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.
Speaker: So they give them a lot of like
Speaker: different flavor profiles.
Speaker: So that way kids don't just get hooked on chicken tenders when they're young.
Speaker: They're used to eating tilapia.
Speaker: You know, it's not like weird and fishy.
Speaker: So they learn about how to eat different things.
Speaker: And then finally, they teach them what a balanced meal looks like.
Speaker: So they drink water or like some like water-based type thing like Gatorade, like Gatorade Zero or whatever.
Speaker: They drink...
Speaker: Or they eat healthy snacks like fruit.
Speaker: And they're also full for the rest of the day, which is a novel concept.
Speaker: I remember going through school and starving because I would never want to eat anything.
Speaker: And also, our lunchtime was so early.
Speaker: And they have an hour-long lunch as an extended break.
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.
Speaker: It is not a throwaway just for the middle of the day.
Speaker: That is a real part of the school day.
Speaker: And we should be looking at ways to think deeper about that.
Speaker: So my number eight is The Labor of Lunch by Jennifer Adams.
Speaker: This just became an episode about that book.
Speaker: If we just would have let Chris keep going.
Speaker: I could keep going.
Speaker: I love that book.
Speaker: Yeah, it is so fascinating just to think about my own.
Speaker: I feel like seventh grade, I have very vivid memories of lunch for some reason.
Speaker: I don't know why beforehand, afterwards, like it is what it is.
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.
Speaker: Anything that's not, you know, mass produced junk food.
Speaker: So it's at.
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.
Speaker: So what a bizarre thing.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: All right.
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.
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.
Speaker: And I tried out a lot of them, but Cohn's work is really rooted more in, um,
Speaker: summarizing, anthologizing the research and actually putting a skeleton, an outline on this idea of progressive education.
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.
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
Speaker: God, you name it, discipline practices, all of those.
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.
Speaker: powerful.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And again, these are all separate essays that are kind of available elsewhere, but just to have them all in one thing.
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?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The, uh,
Speaker: his essay in here from, what is it called?
Speaker: From degrading to degrading is still, I mean, probably HRP all time classic.
Speaker: Like if we do PD on ungrading, that is like our go-to essay there.
Speaker: So yeah, code is kind of getting,
Speaker: getting putting a holistic framework on progressive education and yeah, coming at a very important time in my career too.
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?
Speaker: And who benefits from that and et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: So it's good when cone is cone is probably like the most
Speaker: well-known writer that brings people into the progressive education field.
Speaker: You pretty much can't talk to a progressive educator without Cone coming up at some point.
Speaker: I think the reason is that his work is very accessible.
Speaker: Not only is it all free, but there's not a lot of fluff.
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.
Speaker: Just tell me the things I need to know.
Speaker: And Cone is very research heavy.
Speaker: He's very, he's not very personable.
Speaker: And I don't mean that as like an insult.
Speaker: Like it's just the way it's written.
Speaker: Like it's very like factual and to the point.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I like that.
Speaker: I mean, I've always tried to emulate that and the stuff that we put out too, that it's not story driven.
Speaker: It's just like, there's no emotional connection when you're reading this.
Speaker: It's like, this is why it works.
Speaker: Here you go.
Speaker: Done.
Speaker: And you can kind of fill in your own stories a lot as you go.
Speaker: It is wild to think, too, that Alfie Cohn was such a high profile.
Speaker: He was a public figure.
Speaker: I mean, he was on Oprah.
Speaker: He was a household name in the 1990s.
Speaker: And it's wild to think of who that could even be today.
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.
Speaker: And it's just...
Speaker: It's wild to me how we've moved so far in that other direction.
Speaker: Here's this voice that came out against, you know, these kind of, um,
Speaker: these, these tough standard, you know, very rigorous curriculums in the classroom, but also right.
Speaker: Talk to parents about parenting styles and talk to, you know, kind of just was a social, social critic at the same time.
Speaker: Just, just wild to think of, of how his career has gone.
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.
Speaker: So I'll, I'll be curious to follow up with him on that.
Speaker: Yeah, well, I think it connects well to my number seven.
Speaker: And this might be a crossover later on.
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: But my number seven is Timeless Learning.
Speaker: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools.
Speaker: This is by Pam Moran, Ira Sokol, and Chad Rapp.
Speaker: So Timeless Learning to me is kind of like Alfie Cohn the workbook.
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.
Speaker: Timeless Learning presents similar information but also gives you...
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
Speaker: And it makes you think a lot about, you know, how could we do things differently?
Speaker: Also, the foreword's really good.
Speaker: The foreword's written by Young Joe, who's on our board.
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.
Speaker: They have done the work.
Speaker: Yes, they actually have a real thing.
Speaker: I'll never forget reading about Ira Sokol's...
Speaker: gym program.
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.
Speaker: Lifelong fitness.
Speaker: I'm a living example.
Speaker: Yes, but
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
Speaker: but still involve healthy lifestyles.
Speaker: So there's a lot of ideas like that in this book that really shift your pedagogy.
Speaker: So yeah, Timeless Learning by Pam Moran, Ira Sokol, and Chad
Speaker: And that one is just the best because of exactly that reason.
Speaker: I don't know if Alfie Cohn was ever a classroom teacher, right?
Speaker: But he's kind of approaching things from one lens.
Speaker: He talked for a few years.
Speaker: The authors of Timeless Learning, they're talking about all the things that they've done.
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,
Speaker: The hell it isn't.
Speaker: Like, we've done this.
Speaker: This is the example of what I've done in my school when Pam Moran was the superintendent, right?
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.
Speaker: It's just
Speaker: Again, it's such a holistic perspective, but they're like, we've actually done the work and put it into practice.
Speaker: Here it all is.
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.
Speaker: So such a powerful example.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: I did not put that on my list because I figured you were going to do that.
Speaker: So I'm glad I'm glad that I didn't.
Speaker: So we have an extra one up here.
Speaker: I thought for sure that would be a crossover.
Speaker: No.
Speaker: Six.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay, cool.
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.
Speaker: These probably aren't even writers and researchers who would consider themselves progressive educators or whatever, right?
Speaker: But this was an interesting book that, again, came to me at an interesting time.
Speaker: And I was taking a license renewal class X number of years into my career.
Speaker: And took a course, you know, a licensed real course over this book from Jim Burke.
Speaker: It's called What's the Big Idea?
Speaker: Question-driven units to motivate reading, writing, and thinking.
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.
Speaker: This really just strips it all away and asks that question.
Speaker: Okay, what's the big idea?
Speaker: How can we reformulate that?
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?
Speaker: What is the core concept here?
Speaker: What's the big picture question that we're going to have our kids answer?
Speaker: And then what artifacts we're going to, you know, gather along the way.
Speaker: It really is kind of like a design process.
Speaker: thinking book applied to conceptual learning.
Speaker: And it really was as a result of reading this book that I did just that.
Speaker: I went back through my world history units.
Speaker: I reworked them around those big essential questions.
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.
Speaker: for imperialism unit, but it really just followed the course of the textbook and yada yada.
Speaker: And I was just like, okay, I'm going to throw all of that out.
Speaker: So this is years and years later.
Speaker: I'm going to throw that all out and I'm going to rework it around this big question.
Speaker: What should we do with the artifacts in the British Museum?
Speaker: And then organizing the entire unit around, you know, documents and virtual explorations, op eds, you know, both sides exploring those things.
Speaker: And the end result was students having to, like, justify and, like, curate their own kind of, like, avert.
Speaker: It's kind of like create your own DBQ, right?
Speaker: You select documents, artifacts and things, and you use those to make your case for what we should do with them.
Speaker: Should we give artifacts back?
Speaker: Should we, you know, what different kinds of things?
Speaker: And just framing it in that question, the discussions that we had and, you know, it was such a deeper learning experience than...
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.
Speaker: That's just one example.
Speaker: But I found just the learning was a lot more engaging.
Speaker: I was more engaged in it, too.
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.
Speaker: I really had to
Speaker: had to branch out into that area.
Speaker: So a good book, Jim Burke, What's the Big Idea?
Speaker: I wonder if that's where Dan Kearney got the name for his podcast from.
Speaker: Shout out to Dan.
Speaker: The podcast, What's the Big Idea, is a very good podcast.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: And he is the podcast kind of gets the same thing, right?
Speaker: Just drill down to the essentials.
Speaker: What are you going to do?
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.
Speaker: And here's how you get kids to ask questions.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So my number six is quite similar.
Speaker: I actually see it very similar to my last pick, which was Timeless Learning, because it's written in a very similar way.
Speaker: But it's also got a lot of practical stuff in there that you could actually use.
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.
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.
Speaker: It might have been when it first came out.
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?
Speaker: Because it's so similar to everything that it is that we're talking about.
Speaker: To me, it's a perfect connection between the Manufacturing Happy Citizens book, which is about the issues with mindfulness programs, and
Speaker: with Timeless Learning, which is a book that talks about how do you actually build a school that incorporates progressive education.
Speaker: This book talks about how do you build classrooms in schools that are trauma-informed.
Speaker: And
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Um, it, it not only offers an explanation of all those things, but again, it offers like activities you can do.
Speaker: It offers templates.
Speaker: It offers discussion questions.
Speaker: It is very much designed to be a PD book.
Speaker: And therefore it's something that everyone could, could use to think critically about, uh, their practice.
Speaker: So yeah, I, I love that book.
Speaker: It's that's definitely worth a pickup if only just because it's so timely, it's written post pandemic.
Speaker: So it has that, uh, context, uh,
Speaker: That's equity-centered, trauma-informed education by Alex Bennett.
Speaker: Great book.
Speaker: And Alex is an amazing person, great learner.
Speaker: I mean, her energy and engagement and curiosity is always, it always bounces off onto me whenever we have interactions too.
Speaker: So love, love Alex's work too.
Speaker: All right, what's next?
Speaker: This is going to be five hours long.
Speaker: OK, so number five is another methods book.
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.
Speaker: Another, you know, you can kind of tell this is around my license renewal time.
Speaker: So I had to gobble up all these credits.
Speaker: So so and I.
Speaker: to be a Frank, I was not expecting to get as much out of either of these as I was right.
Speaker: You know, you do the license renewal credits kind of as a formality and it just kind of is what it is.
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.
Speaker: So my, my next one is actually from authors, John Antonetti and James Garver.
Speaker: And it's 17,000 classroom visits.
Speaker: Can't be wrong strategies that engage students, promote active learning and boost achievement.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, I know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Again, it was it was like a book study class around around this.
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.
Speaker: And our district was using, you know, Bloom's taxonomy to root all these conversations.
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.
Speaker: And in my opinion, it made our unit planning suck.
Speaker: It made it boring and it made it, you know,
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.
Speaker: And I hated it.
Speaker: OK, so I'm great to have on curriculum review, by the way.
Speaker: But this actually came with and kind of built their book around this powerful task rubric for designing student work.
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.
Speaker: Instead of saying, right, it's going to be based on this Bloom's ladder or this Bloom's hierarchy or whatever.
Speaker: It's going to be based on these three qualities, cognitive demand, academic strategies and engaging qualities.
Speaker: And then it kind of ranks them in a one, two, three or four.
Speaker: And their rigor divide is.
Speaker: actually is then like a cross section of all of those skills.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So we would just say, okay, at the highest end of things, the, the, the,
Speaker: The instruction or the assessment part that you're evaluating would have students evaluate or create.
Speaker: That's the only Bloom's interaction.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Sounds a lot like our interdisciplinary subject work.
Speaker: It so is.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: So it actually takes, you know, all of it takes domain of knowledge.
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.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And should rely on interdependence instead of independence.
Speaker: It should have a sense of audience.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, right, the lowest form is going to be, right, just an audience of yourself or like a partner or the class.
Speaker: The highest one is like an audience I want to influence, right?
Speaker: There's an element of intellectual and emotional safety, right?
Speaker: In a low cognitive or a low rigorous task, those are not required.
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.
Speaker: So, it just gives us such a new,
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.
Speaker: So I really had to go back and reevaluate some of my own work around this.
Speaker: And what's funny is that a lot of progressive instruction and assessment practices are
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.
Speaker: But yeah, so that was really like both.
Speaker: validating, I suppose.
Speaker: And also, right, just gave this.
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.
Speaker: Unbelievable to me that somebody making six figures as a curriculum director can't do better than Bloom's taxonomy.
Speaker: Give me a break.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: What's that one called again?
Speaker: Oh, that is called 17,000 Classroom Visits Can't Be Wrong.
Speaker: And I believe John Antonetti and I are mutuals on Twitter, too.
Speaker: So shout out to John.
Speaker: Your book's great.
Speaker: Get him on the podcast.
Speaker: Yeah, that's one of those things where it's like,
Speaker: do we reclaim the term or not?
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.
Speaker: I don't really have strong feelings one way or another on it.
Speaker: I just know that it is undeniable that the challenge of
Speaker: what you're tasked to do in a progressive ed classroom is more difficult.
Speaker: Free play, for example, in elementary school is way harder than a worksheet.
Speaker: It's way more cognitively demanding, and you're going to learn a lot more.
Speaker: So despite how some of these things might be perceived, the research is there.
Speaker: My number five is a crossover.
Speaker: My number five is The Schools Our Children's Deserve by Alfie Kohn.
Speaker: And it could really be any Alfie Cohn education book.
Speaker: Like, uh, yep.
Speaker: What's the, the one about no, no contest, which gets into like a standardized testing.
Speaker: Um, the, the case against, um, I can't remember the names of any of his books.
Speaker: The one that's like the case against like,
Speaker: phrase or whatever it is.
Speaker: Oh, yes.
Speaker: Punished by rewards.
Speaker: Maybe is that what you're thinking by rewards?
Speaker: There's another one, too, that gets into.
Speaker: Or is that a different one?
Speaker: I can't remember.
Speaker: He's written a lot of stuff.
Speaker: Regardless, every Alfie Cohn book is pretty darn good.
Speaker: I think the schools our children's deserve and you've kind of already covered it, really.
Speaker: I think that that book is the most generalized and the one that best explains what progressive education is.
Speaker: This is one of the two books on my list that really got me into this kind of stuff.
Speaker: It was very much a stepping stone towards some more, I guess, intense work on progressive ed.
Speaker: But I think The Schools Our Children is Deserted by Alfie Cohn is just a classic.
Speaker: And since you already really spoke about it, I'll just leave it there.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Fork.
Speaker: So 4 for me is not a newer book.
Speaker: I think it came out about 2006, which the context for that is very interesting, right?
Speaker: So if we imagine we're, by 2006, we're half a decade into the No Child Left Behind experiment.
Speaker: You know, we're kind of in the midst of the
Speaker: And everything else that came along with it, right?
Speaker: The no excuses kind of charter schools movement and the expansion of all of that infrastructure across the country.
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.
Speaker: This is my number 11 or number 12.
Speaker: This was on my original list.
Speaker: OK, OK.
Speaker: And so I came late to the game.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I read this 10 years after it came out.
Speaker: And the subheader of that, the subtitle is the restoration of apartheid schooling in America.
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.
Speaker: And what was so striking about this book to me was just how.
Speaker: how he contrasts the schools that we justify giving to kids in low-performing schools.
Speaker: So those are ones attended primarily by low-income students, by black and brown communities, maybe by immigrant communities, et cetera.
Speaker: And
Speaker: justifying the discipline structures that are associated with them too, right?
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.
Speaker: And I don't know if Kozal uses that language, but he says in that book, right?
Speaker: We know what good schools look like.
Speaker: We just give them to rich white people.
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.
Speaker: And they would not stand a day for the kinds of discipline practices, exclusion, et cetera, that get lauded in that.
Speaker: And he has a lot of different case studies in there.
Speaker: And obviously, his is also very rooted in kind
Speaker: kind of that sociological ethnography.
Speaker: He visited a lot of these buildings.
Speaker: He's telling their stories.
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
Speaker: that apartheid schooling that that that would exist in in the 21st century.
Speaker: And of course, we know today that schools are more segregated now than they than they have been since.
Speaker: I think the peak was maybe the 1980s, you know, post Brown v. Board.
Speaker: And it's just been on a downhill slide since then.
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.
Speaker: One of the authors I'm about to mention actually connects with that really well because he also talks about apartheid schooling.
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.
Speaker: You Can't Fire the Bad Ones, which is Bill Ayers and two other people whose names I'm blanking on right now.
Speaker: But it's 18.
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.
Speaker: And it talks about
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.
Speaker: They're just for the rich kids.
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...
Speaker: the more modern censorship.
Speaker: Uh, right.
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,
Speaker: government slash conservative backlash.
Speaker: So yeah, it's interesting.
Speaker: So for my number four, I kind of cheated because I put multiple books on number four.
Speaker: And the reason is I feel like it doesn't really matter which one of these that you read.
Speaker: I just think that every progressive educator should read at least one of these kinds of books.
Speaker: And these are like critical pedagogy
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
Speaker: So the first is On Critical Pedagogy by Henry Giroux, which is just like a modern critical pedagogy text.
Speaker: That's 2011, 2012.
Speaker: It is an intense read.
Speaker: That's like over 400 pages, I'm pretty sure.
Speaker: But you will understand critical pedagogy if you read that book.
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.
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.
Speaker: That just came out this year.
Speaker: Yeah, I have that right now.
Speaker: That's a much more mainstream book, but it's not as deep.
Speaker: My second is Schooling as a Ritual Performance Toward a Political Economy of Educational Symbols and Gestures by Peter McLaren.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: That's all...
Speaker: So, you know, Peter McLaren's also in that like critical pedagogy world.
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.
Speaker: This book specifically like catalogs and puts up tables of
Speaker: all of the things we do, and he doesn't describe it like this, but like the myths of objectivity.
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.
Speaker: So in my opinion, that's the best book by him.
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.
Speaker: Her work is primarily known for
Speaker: continuing the legacy of Paulo Ferreira.
Speaker: So Antonia Darter knew Paulo Ferreira and was kind of like one of his like proteges.
Speaker: She wrote, it's like Paulo Ferreira for the 21st century or something like that.
Speaker: In my opinion, culture and power in the classroom is the most interesting one.
Speaker: The sub header is educational foundations for the schooling of bicultural students.
Speaker: And specifically, this one dives into immigrant studies, ethnic studies, and educating immigrant youth.
Speaker: All of those authors, Giroux, McLaren, Darter, are all a lot more intense.
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.
Speaker: The only other author I think that's in this vein is Ira Shore.
Speaker: I own eight Irish or books.
Speaker: I think I've gotten through a total of 20 pages of all of them combined.
Speaker: I'm sure some people like Irish or I just find it deathly boring.
Speaker: That's saying something because I actually like Drew and Drew is a slow read.
Speaker: But but yeah, I think anyone like the deep critical pedagogy books is a must at some point in someone's career.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Are we in the top three now?
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Oh God, it's getting real intense.
Speaker: It's like if Doomguy did the narration of these things.
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.
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.
Speaker: Interesting interpretation of a top 10 list, but that's okay.
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.
Speaker: So my number three is The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith.
Speaker: And I want to say it's so hard to nail down who recommended this to me.
Speaker: I want to say maybe Nate Babcock on Twitter, but it got so many recommendations.
Speaker: I couldn't ignore it anymore.
Speaker: They were like, what are you doing with your life?
Speaker: stop reading whatever you're doing and get a copy of this book.
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.
Speaker: So it kind of feels a little bit like you're getting your hands on something that you're not supposed to.
Speaker: It's got kind of that subversive kind of occult feel.
Speaker: And so once I got it, this book is my most reread, my most highlighted, my most everything.
Speaker: There is...
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.
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?
Speaker: What is a unit of learning?
Speaker: And sort of the early studies that tried to nail those things down and, you know, where those shortcomings are.
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.
Speaker: So it's a very short read, but it's very approachable as well.
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.
Speaker: We learn from the people that we identify with.
Speaker: And so that identity, he says, creates that opportunity for learning.
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.
Speaker: Right.
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?
Speaker: And he refers to these things as clubs.
Speaker: So he's like, you've got the club of readers.
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.
Speaker: And you just build that identity over the course of your life.
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.
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.
Speaker: Well,
Speaker: What does that even mean, right?
Speaker: It means you don't identify in the ways of thinking that, you know, the club of science thinkers would do.
Speaker: So, right, I really refocused again all of my classroom practices around this idea, like, does this help
Speaker: bring students into the club that I'm trying to creating, or does it push students out, right?
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?
Speaker: And that concept is,
Speaker: was a game changer for me.
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.
Speaker: It's like that idea that you can't fire me.
Speaker: I quit.
Speaker: So kids, you know, disengage, disconnect from school, et cetera.
Speaker: This is the book that I could talk all day about.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: because it was such a game changer.
Speaker: So thank you to those on social media who recommended it to me.
Speaker: And I cannot recommend the book highly enough.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a book of learning and forgetting.
Speaker: That's a good book.
Speaker: I like that one as well.
Speaker: I probably put that in my top 25.
Speaker: I don't think I resonated with it as much as you, but I do see the importance of it as a work.
Speaker: I think that's a really good one.
Speaker: In my top three, my number three is probably like the Dark Horse book.
Speaker: Not because I don't think that it's a progressive education book.
Speaker: It definitely is.
Speaker: I just think this author has been overlooked.
Speaker: She's the person that both of us have connected with a lot.
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.
Speaker: And she just came out the new book like last year and she continually, I know who you're talking about here.
Speaker: And that is, who do you think it is?
Speaker: Susan Engel.
Speaker: It is Susan Engel.
Speaker: So Susan Engel, I guess as a heads up, used to be on our board.
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.
Speaker: That is The End of the Rainbow, How Educating for Happiness, Not Money, Would Transform Our Schools.
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.
Speaker: And I was just like, oh, I've never seen this author before.
Speaker: I'm just going to grab this and read it.
Speaker: And I don't think I've ever been more engaged with a work before.
Speaker: I read it all in one sitting, and it's like 250 pages long.
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.
Speaker: His mantra or his persona feels very much like if you're not doing this, you're doing something wrong.
Speaker: And it can kind of feel bad to read.
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.
Speaker: Susan Engel to me is more approachable Alfie Cohn.
Speaker: I personally would recommend Susan Engel over Alfie Cohn if I were trying to get someone into progressive education.
Speaker: This book features that very research heavy stuff that you would find in an Alfie Cohn book.
Speaker: while being a little bit more narrative focused, but not in a fluffy way.
Speaker: It goes into Susan Engel's work as a child developmental psychologist.
Speaker: So she's done a lot of studies with her students that are the actual studies that she references.
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.
Speaker: of the classroom.
Speaker: And she dives into all of the reasons why child developmental psychologists overwhelmingly say we should not be doing any of those things.
Speaker: Instead, we should just focus on making kids calm and content and having fun.
Speaker: And kids would learn not only the same, but more from being more relaxed and happy day to day.
Speaker: And you can kind of see the thorough line here between all of these books.
Speaker: I think a cornerstone of progressive education is understanding
Speaker: The connections between happiness and contentment and learning.
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.
Speaker: That when you go through the classroom, you're going to be bored to suck it up.
Speaker: You have to deal with it.
Speaker: You have to put yourself up by the bootstraps.
Speaker: And my argument would be no.
Speaker: Like that's not what education is supposed to be.
Speaker: It should be a place of wonder and joy and happiness and democratic action.
Speaker: Like I should want to go to school just like when I was in first grade, how I loved going to school.
Speaker: It should maintain that the entire way all the way.
Speaker: But seriously, this book is so good.
Speaker: It also gets into the debates around research.
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.
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.
Speaker: They learn very complex ways.
Speaker: And there's a lot of other things we need to consider, like the social and emotional side of things that matter.
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.
Speaker: That's a great book.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: In any of Susan's work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The conversations we had with her when she was on the board were just... She's another one too.
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.
Speaker: So it
Speaker: Yeah, so much appreciate, Susan.
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.
Speaker: The most recent wave of, you know, like cognitive neuroscience through like Mary Helen Imordino Yang is confirming those exact same things, right?
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.
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.
Speaker: So, yeah, she's like ahead of her time on that work there.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: Number two.
Speaker: So this one is... This is the part where everybody skipped ahead just to hear this part.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: On the YouTube, it'll say the most watched part if we get any views at all.
Speaker: But...
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.
Speaker: So I think a lot of people got their hands on it.
Speaker: I think I got my hands on it maybe in late March of 2020.
Speaker: This was my first pandemic read.
Speaker: That was like an actual hard read, not something that I'm just trying to distract myself from existential horror with, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because I was so excited to do this.
Speaker: Now, Kevin Gannon is somebody who, you know, we've we've talked with a lot for the podcast.
Speaker: He was up until recently teaching at Grandview College in Des Moines, very close to me.
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.
Speaker: You know, about incarceration and, you know, the prison industrial complex.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: Right.
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.
Speaker: And that connects maybe even back to I'm synthesizing it now, maybe with Frank Smith's those clubs.
Speaker: Are we creating classrooms of death, which in the early part of the pandemic, of course, certainly resonated.
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.
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.
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?
Speaker: The Unite the Right rally there, because he kind of frames it in that famous picture now where you have –
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.
Speaker: And he's like screaming and shouting.
Speaker: He kind of became emblematic of of that whole march.
Speaker: Now, that's that man was a student at the University of Chicago.
Speaker: Nevada or like our campus in Reno, Nevada.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And his whole thing is like, how can you what good is an education?
Speaker: What good is a college education in particular?
Speaker: If you can go through that and proceed and make the decision to fly to Charlottesville and participate in a white nationalist rally.
Speaker: What is the point of that education?
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?
Speaker: And how do we make our classroom spaces and our classrooms?
Speaker: and our institutional structures, you know, geared towards, you know, like that, that de-radicalization.
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,
Speaker: you know, an emotional conceptual punch and really changed the whole way that I thought about things.
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.
Speaker: I was showing them in their own words and I was showing the violence inherent in
Speaker: you know, their presence in a pluralistic society.
Speaker: And some people in my community took umbrage at that for some reason and started to.
Speaker: I wonder why, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, I wonder why.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I asked my principal that same question.
Speaker: I was like, hey, you ever stop to think and maybe why?
Speaker: Maybe why the people are mad that I call the Nazis bad?
Speaker: Huh?
Speaker: What could their motivations and intentions be?
Speaker: So anyway, radical hope must read.
Speaker: Get your hands on it.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So there is we're on the same wavelength here.
Speaker: Because my number two is very similar.
Speaker: However, it came out a few decades earlier.
Speaker: So Paulo Freire is like, that's a household name in the critical pedagogy world.
Speaker: Which, fun fact, Henry Giroux coined the term.
Speaker: Critical pedagogy.
Speaker: Paulo Freire doesn't actually use that word, even though he's considered to be the founder of critical pedagogy.
Speaker: That blew my mind when we were doing the conference.
Speaker: But regardless, I think most people, this is not my pick.
Speaker: Most people think about pedagogy of the oppressed when they think of Paulo Freire.
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.
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.
Speaker: And I think that's a really powerful piece of the book.
Speaker: However, I don't really resonate with the most of the rest of that book.
Speaker: It's very much situated in the world of Paulo Freire of connecting with
Speaker: adult learners in Brazil, which is his origin story.
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.
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.
Speaker: So if you've read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, you know that a lot of that book is about
Speaker: kind of the perils of the poor and the perils of those who do not have power.
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.
Speaker: I mean, Freire is a Marxist.
Speaker: Now, a lot of that work is based on literacy.
Speaker: Freire is probably most well known for developing an adult literacy program so that folks had the wherewithal to navigate these waters.
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.
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?
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.
Speaker: And to me, a better world is one without poverty.
Speaker: And that to me should be obvious, but it sadly is not.
Speaker: Because if you're going to eliminate poverty, you will have to take something from those that have all the power.
Speaker: It doesn't mean that you have to convert to like a communist society.
Speaker: It just means that you have to have a society that is more equal.
Speaker: The reason why Pedagogy of Hope is interesting is that it's written decades after Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Speaker: I believe at this point Ferreira is living either in Europe or North America.
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.
Speaker: And it is a look back at Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
Speaker: So he revises a lot of the work that was in the original and puts more of a hopeful, optimistic twist on it.
Speaker: He talks about why this work is needed and
Speaker: And why progressive educators shouldn't give up.
Speaker: I mean, this was a guy who basically his life was destroyed.
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.
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.
Speaker: Sadly, progressive pedagogy doesn't make you a lot of money.
Speaker: So he wrote,
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.
Speaker: To me, this is one of those books that you go back to when you feel very cynical about education.
Speaker: Because I think another misnomer in this field is that everyone is upset all the time.
Speaker: This is true of progressive politics as well.
Speaker: where it feels like you're always fighting against something.
Speaker: It feels like you're always up against something and that hope can easily be lost.
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.
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
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.
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.
Speaker: So all of that to say,
Speaker: uh, Pedagogy of Hope is a relatively short Paulo Freire book that has a lot of inspirational messages.
Speaker: It's also better translated, uh, than Pedagogy of the Oppressed that can feel a little heavy.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: I have not read Pedagogy of Hope, so that'll have to be on my to-do list.
Speaker: All right, here it comes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I hate it so much.
Speaker: All right.
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.
Speaker: You know, my daughter was born in 2015, my son in 2018.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: You could say, you know, he's neurodivergent in a lot of different ways.
Speaker: He's formally diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder.
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.
Speaker: And, you know, throughout the course of all of that, they were just behavioral disorders.
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.
Speaker: So through through a lot of work and, you know, physical therapy against surgeries, you know, meeting with consultants on that.
Speaker: I foresee his progression through formal schooling as one that will be difficult.
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
Speaker: And so when I read Carla Shalabi's Troublemakers, the subtitle of which is...
Speaker: Let's see here.
Speaker: Lessons in freedom from young children at school really captures the story of, I believe it's four students.
Speaker: And Carla frames these through the lens of them being the canaries in the coal mine.
Speaker: If school is the coal mine, right?
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.
Speaker: They are.
Speaker: other students are harmed by the ways that we treat these kids at the margins too.
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,
Speaker: Lawrence Lightfoot.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot.
Speaker: And the very first words of this book in the forwards, when you open it up, you get in here.
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.
Speaker: In fact,
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.
Speaker: In this educational era, resonating with the appeals for standards and standardization, driven by the requirements of accountability and evaluation,
Speaker: The words, metaphors, and images that come to our minds and haunt our public consciousness carry just the opposite meaning.
Speaker: They speak of uniformity and conformity, management and control of achievement and success as measured by narrow assessment tools and remote quantifiable metrics.
Speaker: And I'll fast forward here.
Speaker: She goes on, in our efforts to control and measure, in fact, we often confuse difference with deviance, illness with identity.
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.
Speaker: And
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.
Speaker: And there's so much power in the stories that she tells because she it's basically an ethnography.
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.
Speaker: So, again, it's hard not to.
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.
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.
Speaker: I mean, that's a fantastic book.
Speaker: I'm going to also put that at my number 11.
Speaker: I really like that book.
Speaker: And there's a lot of great, great stuff in there.
Speaker: It could fit in my top 10 quite easily.
Speaker: I just wasn't thinking about it.
Speaker: That's a great work.
Speaker: So to keep the pace going here as we hit the hour and a half mark.
Speaker: This is good content.
Speaker: Should have been top five.
Speaker: You could probably guess my number one book because I talk about this book
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.
Speaker: It is the book that made me want to be a teacher or at least solidified it.
Speaker: And it's the book that is the cover yellow.
Speaker: The cover is it's yellow or green.
Speaker: I think depending on the edition, I can't remember which one's which the cover is yellow.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Just so.
Speaker: So that book is Teaching to Transgress, Education as the Practice of Freedom by Bell Hooks.
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.
Speaker: It incorporates her experience of growing up in segregated classrooms and on anti-racist education.
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.
Speaker: I went ahead and pulled up because you read a quote.
Speaker: I figured I'd pull up one of my quotes from this book.
Speaker: Hooks writes, when education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share or to confess.
Speaker: Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students.
Speaker: Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow and are empowered by the process.
Speaker: That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks.
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.
Speaker: When professors...
Speaker: bring narratives, all of their experiences into classroom discussions.
Speaker: It eliminates the possibility that we can function as all knowing, silent and arrogant.
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.
Speaker: I think a very valid criticism
Speaker: of a lot of books that are popular on progressive education.
Speaker: So not like your jerroos and stuff.
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.
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
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.
Speaker: Those for rich white kids that are capable of having the cool progressive schools.
Speaker: One of the things that bothers me a lot about doing the work that we do at HRP is that
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.
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.
Speaker: They're not going to bring in folks like us to do cool work because they're worried about rumorization and keeping up.
Speaker: So to me, Teaching Transgress is a book about hope.
Speaker: It's a book about understanding how to teach.
Speaker: And to me, it's the validity factor.
Speaker: When I read that book, I think that what I'm doing is right and I'm not a crazy person.
Speaker: Because there were many times in my teaching career where I would walk in every day and I'd be like,
Speaker: Like, am I just doing this all wrong?
Speaker: Because it doesn't feel right.
Speaker: It feels like I'm like messing up or this is too chaotic.
Speaker: It's too weird.
Speaker: I'm being too open.
Speaker: And that book really, really nailed it for me.
Speaker: Teaching community, teaching for community, I think is just as good.
Speaker: I think that teaching a transgressor is slightly more applicable for day to day practice, but they're both great books.
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.
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
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.
Speaker: It is is is so so cool and so useful.
Speaker: I mean, it really just fits with his understanding and his experiences of the world kind of in that that comic book format.
Speaker: And you can you can see just how many of these little tabs I have in Freire and Hooks into that book.
Speaker: Yeah, it's exactly it.
Speaker: And but but the tabs are because he has so much useful stuff.
Speaker: It's just like these really useful diagrams that you could make photocopies of these these organizers and protocols.
Speaker: It's just such a useful operational, you know, book to implement these practices like.
Speaker: It's culturally responsive teaching.
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.
Speaker: So that's that's great.
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: I'm flying through.
Speaker: I'm going to cut you off.
Speaker: My next one would be Excellent Sheep by William Dureshowitz.
Speaker: It was the book I always handed to kids.
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.
Speaker: You go through middle school and high school and you go to college and then you do this and then you do this.
Speaker: And then you hope that you get a good job.
Speaker: And then along the way, all that purpose finding is lost.
Speaker: which I'm just going to toss it in here right now.
Speaker: My next book on the list was The Path to Purpose by William Damon that outlines all that purpose-finding research.
Speaker: To me, those two books go hand in hand.
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,
Speaker: And have been just as successful as though people like it and do elite colleges to me.
Speaker: Yeah.
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.
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.
Speaker: I pull all three of those together, uh, and talk about, uh,
Speaker: Like, what does it mean to go to college?
Speaker: And like, does it matter where you get into?
Speaker: And the thesis behind all of that is it doesn't.
Speaker: It doesn't matter where you go because it's all about connections anyway.
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.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Can I have two more honorable mentions?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because I wasn't sure.
Speaker: I just connected a bunch of them.
Speaker: I wasn't sure where to include this, but it was just so formative, again, in my early college experience.
Speaker: And I associate this book, I probably talked about this before, but with the professor that I had who taught this class.
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.
Speaker: But he was really encouraging.
Speaker: you know, developing my thinking and, and pushing my thinking on these topics too.
Speaker: But, um, I, I remember reading James Baldwin's the fire next time.
Speaker: And it's a book that I probably read three or four.
Speaker: Is it okay.
Speaker: And it's not an education book, right?
Speaker: It's not a book about, it's not about pedagogy.
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.
Speaker: And it's so, um, informative in, um,
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.
Speaker: But yeah, just there's not anybody I think who can touch the prose of Baldwin and the impact that his words have.
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.
Speaker: And one more.
Speaker: then would be John Dewey's Democracy and Education.
Speaker: I mean, probably like the founding text of progressive education would be like Dewey's work.
Speaker: And it's dense.
Speaker: I have not read this whole book.
Speaker: I've read parts of all of the pieces of it to kind of synthesize it.
Speaker: But he was one who really was doing laying that foundation for thinking of exactly that.
Speaker: Like, what is the purpose of education?
Speaker: What's the purpose of education?
Speaker: to create citizens?
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
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.
Speaker: What else you got?
Speaker: I'm done.
Speaker: I got three more quick ones.
Speaker: Two of them were kind of in that same like the fire next time type of vibe.
Speaker: Uh, getting into like carceral pedagogy.
Speaker: One would be the recently released.
Speaker: They do that.
Speaker: We do this till they free us by Kaba.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
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.
Speaker: It's a very well-written book.
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.
Speaker: Uh, I,
Speaker: I love that book as well.
Speaker: I considered putting it in the top 10.
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.
Speaker: So it would probably be up in the top 10 if I didn't put those in there.
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
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.
Speaker: I know that's like a pop sci book that used to be really popular like five to 10 years ago.
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
Speaker: for extroverted thinking.
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.
Speaker: And I find a lot of connections there to one to myself because I was always a very quiet person.
Speaker: I still am.
Speaker: I am not the kind of person that likes to do small talk and just constantly like present.
Speaker: It's just not my thing despite doing an hour and 40 minute long podcast.
Speaker: I don't like talking.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
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.
Speaker: They don't communicate by speaking.
Speaker: They write everything out or they present things in different ways.
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.
Speaker: That doesn't mean that we can't acknowledge the existing issues and prepare people for those problems.
Speaker: It doesn't mean we need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Speaker: But we can do two things at once.
Speaker: We can chuckle those concepts.
Speaker: So that's my list.
Speaker: There's just...
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.
Speaker: You can communicate on voice and through video.
Speaker: You can communicate via text.
Speaker: And some people only communicate in one form or the other.
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.
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.
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.
Speaker: You could listen to them.
Speaker: You could listen to them.
Speaker: You could watch YouTubers cover them.
Speaker: I'm sure there's a lot of different things you could do.
Speaker: You could listen to our podcast where we bring up a lot of these themes.
Speaker: But the
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.
Speaker: And it's just true of every like niche.
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.
Speaker: Like, oh, if you haven't read bell hooks, then you can't call yourself a progressive educator.
Speaker: Because there are so many different times where like,
Speaker: we'll be talking to folks and I'll be like, you won't believe it.
Speaker: We got Henry Giroux to present at our conference.
Speaker: And they're like, who's Henry Giroux?
Speaker: And I'm sitting there like the dude's written like 70 books on progressive education.
Speaker: How do you not know who he is?
Speaker: There's a lot of people that don't know like this kind of stuff.
Speaker: I've only read kind of like you.
Speaker: I think I've only read like 20 pages of Dewey because I can't stand it.
Speaker: It's so boring.
Speaker: But like I understand the impact of like his work and like I'm probably missing things out there.
Speaker: I didn't read Maria Montessori until a few years ago.
Speaker: And I know how much of an impact she had on education.
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.
Speaker: That doesn't necessarily mean that they're not a real progressive educator, whatever that means.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe that was a little bit of my rationale.
Speaker: behind presenting that journey too.
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.
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.
Speaker: So yeah, we're all on our own journey and I would love to see people share their own
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?
Speaker: What did we miss out on?
Speaker: What should we be reading, too?
Speaker: Because, you know, obviously, there's only so much time for us to have read up to this point.
Speaker: So we couldn't have...
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
