Book Review January: Teacher & Child by Haim Ginott This work outlines the day-to-day interactions teachers have with children, offering suggestions to solve the minute interactions that encompass most of this profession. Chris McNutt 1 Feb 2021 • 9 min read
Book Review We Want to Do More Than Survive Love’s approach to teaching invites us to build our pedagogical praxis around civic engagement and intersectional justice so we can move past reformist paradigms and practice educational freedom. Vineeta Singh 19 Dec 2020 • 13 min read
Book Review December: A Wolf At the Schoolhouse Door & the Unmaking of Public Education What are the tenets guiding the unmaking of public education, what are the aims of the unmakers, and what is there for the rest of us to be worried about? Nick Covington 4 Dec 2020 • 10 min read
Book Review November: Manufacturing Happy Citizens by Edgar Cabanas & Eva Illouz Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lives by Edgar Cabanas & Eva Illouz provides a convincing condemnation of "positive psychology", the relatively recent scientific study of happiness. Chris McNutt 12 Nov 2020 • 14 min read
Book Review August: Radical Teacher, Academic Journal Published by the University of Pittsburgh, Radical Teacher is a self-described socialist, feminist, and anti-racist journal founded in 1975. Since 2013, the entire publication is accessible for free online, double peer-reviewed, and filled with in-depth articles. Chris McNutt 23 Aug 2020 • 5 min read
Book Review Book Review: At What Cost? David Gleason paints a dire picture of the pressure we put on adolescents and convincingly insists that it is us - and not the students - who need to change. Dan Kearney 21 Jul 2020 • 4 min read
Book Review July: “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!” by William Ayers, Crystal Laura, and Rick Ayers “You Can’t Fire the Bad Ones!” And 18 Other Myths About Teachers, Teachers’ Unions, and Public Education by William Ayers, Crystal Laura, and Rick Ayers provides a quick-to-understand, ready-to-read breakdown of the common assaults against public education and its workers. Chris McNutt 7 Jul 2020 • 8 min read
Book Review June: Can 2020 Be the Year of Radical Hope? What we absolutely can and should do, however, is define our work as educators biased toward life-affirming, student-centered, inclusive praxis and create a space where we can do the work of reversing the decomposition... a Radical Hope. Nick Covington 8 Jun 2020 • 8 min read
Book Review May: The Art of Critical Pedagogy by Jeffrey M.R. Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell The Art of Critical Pedagogy provides an overview of the concept of critical pedagogy, showcases why it is needed in urban contexts, and provides three case studies of what it actually looks like in practice. Chris McNutt 18 May 2020 • 8 min read
Book Review April: The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work by Linda Darling-Hammond Darling-Hammond’s work, which is nearly 400 pages with 200 citations, is a formative review of inner-working and issues within the United States education system, and perfectly captures the need for progressive policies. Chris McNutt 15 Apr 2020 • 17 min read
Book Review March: Range by David Epstein Do specialists actually get better with experience or not, and is narrow, deliberate practice the only way to achieve greatness in a given field? Nick Covington 31 Mar 2020 • 14 min read
Book Review February: The End of Homework: How Homework Disrupts Families, Overburdens Children, and Limits Learning by Etta Kralovec and John Buell The End of Homework by Etta Kralovec and John Buell offers a succinct and researched account of why homework does little to actually improve academic performance, and instead hurts a family’s overall well-being. Chris McNutt 9 Feb 2020 • 11 min read
Book Review January: “The Case for Constructivist Classrooms” ...constructivism has been a consistent but controversial and often caricatured counterweight to the recurring top-down reform movements — rooted in accountability and standardized test scores — that have defined the last 30 years of the educational debate. Nick Covington 27 Jan 2020 • 8 min read
Book Review December: The Labor of Lunch: Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools by Jennifer E. Gaddis The Labor of Lunch by Jennifer E. Gaddis is a treatise on the United States school lunch system: its history, battle over nutritional quality, and those who are fighting to change it. Chris McNutt 17 Nov 2019 • 7 min read
Book Review November: An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, adapted by Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese An Indigenous Peoples’ History consistently poses questions that counteract misinformation about Native communities, specifically stories that are usually taught in elementary school Chris McNutt 3 Nov 2019 • 3 min read
Book Review October: The Schools Our Children Deserve by Alfie Kohn In contrast with the methods books I had read for coursework and professional development, Kohn’s voice spoke to me with an urgency, a moral weight and clarity which framed dry topics... Nick Covington 26 Sep 2019 • 10 min read
Book Review September: Free School Teaching: A Journey into Radical Progressive Education by Kristan Accles Morrison Free School Teaching: A Journey into Radical Progressive Education by Kristan Accles Morrison is an exemplar of what self-directed, progressive schooling looks like. Chris McNutt 2 Sep 2019 • 6 min read
Book Review August: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson ...white rage through the most explosive periods in America’s racial history, which the reader comes to understand through the brutal clarity and consistent facts of the historical narrative. Nick Covington 25 Jul 2019 • 9 min read