If You Liked This Book, Then Read This

For today I made a simple graphic highlight a number of 2022 books. These are all books I've read this year that I can't get enough of. For some students, sometimes that familiar book is just the next step to push them towards something fresh.

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HyperDocs: Creating Ownership Through Exploration

HyperDocs are here, and the potential for student exploration and engagement seems bountiful. But hold up— Before we delve into the potential, what is a HyperDoc? The short answer is: It's a Google Doc with a variety of links that leads to a number of different tasks. Once students receive this doc, they're free to explore it in any order and any pace of their choosing. But to sum up a HyperDoc as a Google Doc with just a bunch of links would be the equivalent of saying Moby Dick is a book about a whale. To be so reductive is to miss the point. To see a full HyperDoc Click Here Going Beyond the Workshop Model As an ELA teacher, I'm a workshop model kind of guy. Walk into my class at any given moment, and you know what you will see. The first ten minutes? Reading. The next five to ten minutes? Quick Write. Followed by mini-lessons, workshop time and sharing somewhere in-between. It's routine (and never boring). Often times, I map out my work weeks in advan...

Read This: This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell

There seems to be no shortage of Anti-Racist texts. Whether you're going with How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi or his remixed version of Stamped with Jason Reynolds or the increasingly scrutinized (but I argue, still important) White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, you can find anti-racist texts. But the one anti-racist book you should definitely read? Tiffany Jewell's This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work . This is a book that's circulated on my periphery for some time. I purchased this along with half a dozen other anti-racist texts, but when I received it, I gave it a cursory glance and thought, "looks interesting, but maybe not for my students." I pushed it aside temporarily and figured I would get to it. After hearing Jewell speak at #KidLit4BlackLives , the book immediately moved to the top of my queue. I can't stress this enough: this is a book that you need to read. It demands you...

Best LGBTQ Books for Students of 2019

October is LGBTQ history month. This is the perfect opportunity to expose our students to LGBTQ texts. For me, this is essential. As a student, the closest I could find to LGBTQ characters were Tom from The Glass Menagerie , the random David Sedaris piece and Michael Thomas Ford's books (which as a teenager I was way too young to be reading about). Now, there's a number of LGBT characters and representation in literature, but if you're an educator, where do you start? What I'm hoping is that my students will see queer texts not as queer texts, but simply texts. Often times (and not to generalize, but here I go anyway) my straight male students will avoid anything with even a hint of gay subtext. The more I talk to my students, it's clear that there is still an internalized insecurity. What they read might say something about themselves. In truth, a book is a book, queer characters or not. The easiest way to break the ice with that stereotype is that I always tel...

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