Recommended Resources

Resources for Supporting Great Teaching

Websites

• Brooke Charter Schools’ Elements of Effective Instruction Video Library: This amazing resource contains dozens of videos, lessons and student work highlighting excellent aspects of K-9 instruction.

• EngageNY: One of the first and most comprehensive resources on the shift to Common Core Standards. This site offers some very high quality unit and lesson plans (here is a favorite high school ELA lesson ) as well as instructional videos and student work.

• Teachers’ College Reading and Writing Project: This website contains all of Lucy Calkins’ work and the related curriculum inspired by her work.

• The Writing Revolution (TWR): While I am typically skeptical of prescriptive approaches to reading and writing, Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler have convinced me that there is a right way to teaching students who to write clearly and fluently. Their recently published book is a must read, too!

• The Lexile Framework for Reading: A great resource for ensuring that students are independently accessing texts at the right rigor level.

• The Vermont Writing Collaborative: Strong student work samples and excellent PD options for writing teachers.

• Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks, Digital Item Library and Standards Navigator: Updated state standards for all major curriculum components as well as links to sample assessment questions connected to each standard.

Books and Other Publications

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion & Our Mission to Close the Achievement and Opportunity Gap

• White Fragility (DiAngelo)

• Young, Gifted and Black (Perry, Steele and Hilliard III)

• Everyday Antiracism: Getting Real About Race in School (Pollock)

• “Conversations about Race Need to be Fearless” (Singleton)

• Whistling Vivaldi (Steele)

• Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? (Tatum)

• “The Opportunity Myth” (TNTP)

• The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us (Tough)

• “Who Gets to Graduate?” (Tough)

• Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why (Tough)

Literacy

• In the Middle: A Lifetime Learning about Reading, Writing and Adolescents (Atwell)

• Making Sense of Phonics (Beck)

• Bringing Vocabulary to Life (Beck)

• Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading (Fischer, Frey and Lapp)

• They Say, I Say (Graff)

• On Writing (King)

• Reading Reconsidered (Lemov)

• Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning (Schmoker)

• On Solid Ground (Taberski)

• Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop (Ray)

• On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Non-Fiction Writing (Zinser)

General Resources on Teaching, Learning and Child Development

• “How Not to Talk to Your Kids” (Bronson)

• Mindset (Dweck)

• “Stand and Deliver Revisited” (Jesness)

• “The Terrible Teens” (Kohlbert)

• “The Interleaving Effect: Mixing it Up Boosts Learning” (Pan)

• How People Learn (National Research Council)

• “Teaching Adolescents to Become Learners” (University of Chicago)

• The Knowledge Gap (Wexler)

Resources on organizational culture and leadership

• Daring Greatly (Brown)

• Atomic Habits (Clear)

• The Culture Code (Coyle)

• Better (Gwande)

• The Checklist Manifesto (Gwande)

• Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better (Lemov)

• The Four Tendencies (Rubin)

• Better Than Before (Rubin)

• Radical Candor (Scott)

• Flourish (Seligman)

• Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most (Stone)

• Nudge (Thayler and Sunstein)