wrap-up of recent reading

[Connie Weber]

After about a year of being hugely-invested in reading, these are the books I've selected as most influential and important to me... reread them all back-to-back, trying for some kind of a synthesis.



Left Back is primarily for reference; it helps me get the eras in perspective. I started on the chapter "The Great Meltdown" and continued from there: The Great Meltdown, The Sixties, In Search of Standards. That covers the eras of my whole life, up until about 2000. This book is purely historical (back in time) and has no mention of the Great Shift in learning that's come up in this new century. But Ravitch is brilliant. I don't always agree with her, but sure love having her out there as a lead educational thinker of our time.

Clockwise: Deborah Meier's In Schools We Trust. This book is home to me. Just plain home. How I wish a number of educators with the philosophy (and learning habitat, learning culture) that Meier shares so well with us--how I wish we could come together in supportive networks that provide the ecology for democratic learning, as in her model, Mission Hill. I think we can. Only let's hybridize it with a very strong online component! As you can see, Meier makes me dream, makes me want to make dreams real. Why can't we just DO IT? What obstacles get in our way?

(Standards, lack of time, lack of connection, non-distributed hierarchical leadership, cultural illusions that the sort of of learning that counts is accumulation of facts and not the overarching thinking-capabilities component, not enough teachers realizing that they absolutely must get into the digital world, administration being even farther behind in tech, state budgets that have to be balanced year by year and not half-decades or decades so we never get outside the same ol' box, students who expect to be entertained, students who have lost their natural motivation to learn, students who haven't learned to think for themselves and be tough strong learners.)

Just had to answer my own question about obstacles. Maybe you have some more to add?

Global Achievement Gap by Tony Wagner. You could read the preface, the intro, and chapter one: "The New World of Work and the Seven Survival Skills," which seem spot-on to me. In the rest of the book, of particular note to me is the chapter on "Reinventing the Education Profession," and I would dearly love to talk to people here about Wagner's ideas. For the most part I think Wagner is really onto something--he sees what education needs with a wide scope--but he doesn't then get to the right conclusions about where to go with what he sees. Well, sometimes. But we can do better.

Making Learning Whole by David Perkins: another "at-home" book for me, ranking up there with Meier. In fact, put Making Learning Whole together with Intellectual Character by Ron Ritchhart and The Thinking Classroom by Shari Tishman and you're got an excellent beginning for how to turn dull and regular school-classes into totally-charged and synergetic learning habitats. Inspiration! Truth! Goodness! Yes, this sort of learning is exactly what we're after.

Learning by Heart by Roland S. Barth: pure and profound, sensible, real, hopeful, able-to-be-actualized. This is the book I'd hand to anybody anywhere who says, "How do we get our school culture correctly framed?" Here is a solid Vision. It has to do with the quality of collegiality in a school.

Self-Theories: Carol Dweck is a master of showing us different approaches to learning. She makes a nice dichotomy between learners, a dichotomy that most people don't see at all: "active-mindset learners" vs. "static-mindset learners," or "the theory of malleable intelligence"vs. "the theory of fixed intelligence" vs. It's amazing how important those constructs are. Thank you to Ron Ritchhart for telling me about Dweck. He was right: this is Essential Understanding. Turns out a learner's interior view of herself as a learner makes absolutely enormous difference in capability, even over-riding what is usually thought of as simply "intelligence."


Turning Learning Right Side Up by Ackoff and Greenberg: radical, sharp, astute, contemporary, insightful about both the history and future of education. Way out there, very forward. That content would have half of the conservatives running directly away and the other half standing at a distance, cocking their heads sideways like golden retrievers do when they really want to understand something and find it terribly curious. The liberals? They may find the book stretches them towards conservative thinking they hadn't pondered before: yes, it's radical. Of the roots. It's about roots, and about branches way out into a wild future. It'll get everyone agitated. Anyone who wants to have a discussion about Turning Learning Right Side Up will find an eager participant here!

Three more books to go, in this independent-reading summary.

Five Minds for the Future: read "A Personal Introduction" in the book to get an illuminating overview; you can see if the book's up your alley. Sure is for me. "Following two world wars, and a prolonged cold war, we have now embarked on what may be the ultimate-all-encompassing episode of globalization." (page 16) "I believe that current formal education still prepares students primarily for the world of the past, rather than for possible worlds of the future--..." (page 17) Gardner's portraits of the "minds" that contribute to human learning provides a superb framework for us as we work on "cultivating thinking" as educators. I know which mind I lean towards most. How about you? Here they are: "The Disciplined Mind," "The Synthesizing Mind," "The Creating Mind," "The Respectful Mind," "The Ethical Mind."

True Enough: It's True Enough. Purely contemporary. See what's happening now with information flow. Easy reading, maybe a bit too light, but it'll break you out of any vision obtained by looking through rose-colored glasses, thinking how joyfully open learning is in this age of overwhelming information. No, we're not really that open-minded. Manjoo shows how we have a tendency to group ourselves in "tribes," and rather than becoming more open and widely-informed, we can become more narrow, looking only at highly- and perhaps blindly-filtered information.

Finally in this bookset review, the book that most changed my thinking about poverty in America, a problem that needs to be on all our minds: Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh. This is a bring-it-all-down-to-the-base book, showing that no matter how good your theories of learning are, no matter how skilled you are at setting up positive learning climates, you have simply got to have diversity. Socio-economic diversity. It's for the benefit of everyone. Eradication of poverty is going to take some doing. And it can be done.

That's it for now. Happy to discuss any part of this. Would love it if you'd put up a picture or review of some of your recent reading.

I love having this networked-space, Fireside, love being able to share thoughts. Thank you all for making this space possible, for being participants in an endeavor that brings us all along, networked-learning. (And do you know how we're leading the way? Do you know how still relatively unusual this is?)