Top 15 Books Every New (or Experienced) Teacher Should Read
A compilation of our must read, go-to, favorite education and curriculum books for new (and veteran ) teachers.
So, you decided to become a teacher… Congratulations! Welcome to the most rewarding profession of all time (as well as most time consuming). Every teacher knows how much work and effort goes into creating an insanely awesome lesson as well as the importance of a well managed classroom environment. With over two decades in the profession, we have compiled our must read, go-to, favorite education and curriculum books for new (and veteran ) teachers.
The First Days of School: How To Be An Effective Teacher by Harry K. Wong, Rosemary T. Wong This is a book we return to year after year. It has great tips on classroom management and designing lessons for the year.
Discipline with Dignity: How to Build Responsibility, Relationships, and Respect in Your Classroom by Richard L. Curwin. This book revolutionized the way we looked at discipline and classroom management. It is chock full of amazing strategies and wisdom for creating an awesome classroom community.
Focus: Elevating the Essentials to Radically Improve Student Learning by Mike Schmoker . This is one of those books that you read and you immediately want to change everything you have been previously doing when it comes to curriculum design and instruction. This book is awesome! It gets right to the heart of what is important in regards to elevating student learning.
Strategies That Work, 3rd edition: Teaching Comprehension for Engagement, Understanding, and Building Knowledge, Grades K-8 by Stephanie Harvey. This curriculum book is a must have resource for teaching reading. It has so many amazing lessons on how to explicitly teach thinking strategies so that students become engaged, thoughtful, independent readers.
In the Best Interest of Students: Staying True to What Works in the ELA Classroom Kelly Gallagher is our all time favorite teacher author. We Stan Kelly G! His lessons are always on point! In this book he outlines best practices for any ELA classroom. He states that “what remains constant is the need to stay true to what we know works in the teaching of reading, writing, speaking and listening, instead of just blindly adhering to the latest standards movement."
The Common Core Guidebook: Informational Text Lessons, Guided Practice, Suggested Book Lists, and Reproducible Organizers, Grades 3-5 or The Common Core Guidebook, Grades 6-8: Informational Text Lessons, Guided Practice, Suggested Book Lists, and Reproducible Organizers We owe a great deal of gratitude to teacher author Rozlyn Linder. This book is the essential resource for anyone teaching students in grades 6-8 or grades 3-5 to navigate informational text. This book walks you through each informational text reading standard, aligns each standard to research-based strategies, and explicitly shows you how to introduce and model those strategies in your classroom.
Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning, 4th Edition-This book is a required read for new teachers. It is full of awesome strategies and lessons for getting your students to comprehend and interact with any text.
Deeper Learning by Jay McTighe and Harvey Silver - We noticed after the Common Core State Standards were implemented, that our students no longer were able to think deeply about the texts that they read. They got the superficial, on the surface understanding, but not the deep rooted. This book helped us to get our students to dig deeper into the text and make meaning for themselves. Denise loved the book so much, she wrote a blog post about it!
Teaching the Core Skills of Listening and Speaking by Erik Palmer. If your students are anything like ours, they often times suffer in their listening and speaking skills. We do most of our communicating—in the classroom and in life—through listening and speaking. This book is “Filled with examples and specific activities targeted to a variety of subjects and grade levels, this book is an essential resource for all teachers interested in helping students acquire core skills that cross the content areas and support long-term success in listening and speaking.”
Teaching Interpretation: Using Text Based Evidence to Construct Meaning This book gives us all the feels. It is the BEST book to use to help guide your teaching when it comes to interpreting text. We can not recommend it enough!.
Beyond Literary Analysis: Teaching Students to Write with Passion and Authority About Any Text - Want your students to analyze texts and write about them without using the same tired and boring template? This book is your go-to! Our students’ written analysis of texts improved ten-fold after teaching the methods described in this book.
We Got This.: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be When students don’t feel valued or listened to, their education suffers. “We Got This” shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. What we hear can spark action that allows us to make powerful moves toward equity by broadening access to learning for all children. A lone teacher can't eliminate inequity, but Cornelius demonstrates that a lone teacher can confront the scholastic manifestations of racism, sexism, ableism and classism within your school or your students’ lives.”
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly Daniel Tatum, a renowned authority on the psychology of racism, argues that “straight talk about our racial identities is essential if we are serious about enabling communication across racial and ethnic divides”. These topics have only become more urgent as the national conversation about race is increasingly acrimonious.” Simply put, this book is a must read!
Letting go of Literary Whiteness- If you are looking to let go of the White centered classic literary cannon that many teachers and schools still follow, (think To Kill a Mockingbird, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, etc) then this is the book for you. This book is all that and will guide you in "designing literature-based units that emphasize racial literacy, selecting literature that highlights voices of color, analyzing Whiteness in canonical literature, examining texts through a critical race lens, managing challenges of race talk, and designing formative assessments for racial literacy and identity growth.”
This Book Is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do The Work- Not only is this a great book for teachers, but it should be required reading for all of your students. It is an awesome book, with over 20 lessons that you can teach to your class to create a community that works together to fight racism and begin the process of becoming an ally for all Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.
These are just some of the books that we use to help guide our teaching, but new and amazing books are being written every year. Let us know if you end up reading any of these books. We want’t to know your thoughts. Did we leave off your favorite books? If so, please share!
Until next time teacher friends,
Bottoms Up!