A book thread - be still my
!
Readicide changed the way that I taught forever - it got me to focus on literacy as a primary lens for teaching, and helped me to understand why students can be so resistant to reading, ultimately leading to the development of teaching strategies to increase literacy skills within a content area.
Other People's Children started me on the journey towards diversity, equity, and inclusion in my educational and teaching approaches, and resulted in a lot of personal paradigm shifts that I know made me a stronger educator.
The Death and Life of the Great American School System was a really helpful primer in understanding the broad strokes of educational policy in the US, and helped me to develop a deep sense of empathy for how we run educational experiments on some of our most vulnerable populations.
Radical Candor is a more recent read that's helped me immensely with interpersonal interactions, which I've also applied to teaching. I
this book beyond belief and recommend it to anyone and everyone I meet:
Switch has been influential in helping me to understand the ways that people can be resistant to change (and learning can definitely be a whole lot of change!) and how to develop strategies to help make change management a less frightening prospect.
Value Proposition Design is a book that I've just started, and am working through it as an exercise in developing a value proposition for education - namely the R for Data Science Online Learning Community that I've been facilitating.