Pleasure Reading
Posted: September 9th, 2011 | Author: Michael Goldstein | | 7 Comments »
Kids often carry around pleasure reading books during school. That’s typically for when they finish an assignment more quickly than other kids.
This year, we’re experimenting with encouraging this for teacher trainees. Our staff made a list of some ed-related books that we’ve enjoyed. Each trainee picked one to read during downtime. We bought ‘em (thank you donors).
5 are about an individual teacher experience, 7 about education policy in some way. Then there’s 2 books of broader interest.
Here’s a fascinating counterpoint to the notion that making a mistake somehow diminishes you as a person. We shouldn’t fear error, the author says; rather, we should embrace it because it’s our capacity for making mistakes that makes us who we are.
The authors teach us how to create the change we’d like to see in the world using a deceptively simple framework (e.g. “Make the Undesirable Desirable” and “Design Rewards and Demand Accountability”). Many of the concepts are intuitive – the problem is that I had never intuited them before, much less put them all together in a framework I could act on.
thanks for including me, mike and company–
good list, too.
what about Relentless Pursuit, Donna Foote’s account of four TFA CMs at a rough LA high school?
not exactly a model for teacher preparation, but vivid and telling and some good organizational history in there, too.
thanks!
Alexander, yep. We actually assign a bunch of folks to read Relentless Pursuit (along with many other books), so it didn’t make the pleasure reading circuit…
I would like to see Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the great American School, Klein’s Shock Doctrine or Lipman’s The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberal Urbanism, Race, and the Right to the City. However, I doubt most charter schools would have the courage to expose their teachers or students to the research on charter schools or the neoliberal agenda driving their proliferation.
But the neoliberal books are the most expensive! We can barely afford the old fashioned liberal.
This reading list does seem heavily skewed towards journalists who are pro-charter, but who otherwise know very little about education. For fiction, what about “Up the Down Staircase.” For serious research, try “The Consequences of Growing Up Poor,” John Mollenkopf’s “Inheriting the City,” or some of Diane Ravitch’s more recent work (perhaps her history of the New York City schools, if you want something less anti-charter). For good education journalism, how about Jonathan Kozol. The actual education credentials of some of the authors you picked is limited at best. Jay Mathews, Steven Brill, and Richard Whitmire are mostly (somewhat unwitting) shills for the charter movement. I was a charter teacher, and I will likely return to a CMO at some point. I’m not an opponent of the movement. But if we’re trying to create a generation of committed teachers, we can’t tell half (or even less) of the story and expect to have people stay in the profession. Eventually, they’ll see past the good state test scores at some charters and discover that all that glitters is not gold. Creating good schools on any kind of scale is a complex problem which, other than in “Common Ground,” I don’t see reflected in your reading list. If you are really trying to do better than traditional ed schools, you need to be more thoughtful in your approach.
“This reading list does seem heavily skewed towards journalists who are pro-charter, but who otherwise know very little about education.”
True that. As it happens, I’m a former journalist who knows very little about education. So you can imagine how this sort of bias creeps in.
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