A recent traveler to New Zealand was complaining that the house where he stayed while he was there was unbearably cold in the winter. The reason it was so uncomfortable, he said, was that the Scottish settlers who built their houses there neglected to change their perspective.

They built their houses to capitalize on the warmth of southern exposure only they were in the southern hemisphere where everything is reversed. They should have been building for a northern exposure instead.

Summertime, especially for educators, is a slip into a different hemisphere. The pace slows just enough to allow a newly angled perspective, surprising ideas or, at the very least, a longer range view of your life and work. If you have been looking south, it may be the time to look north.

One way to capitalize on this mental shift (after you have had your fill of  blissful beach reading, of course) is to pick up a book on a professional topic.  A book that is not too dense and technical, but one that is thought-provoking and can help you take a fresh look at what you do and how you do it.

Below are some reading recommendations from our webinar speakers. These are books they have singled out as well worth your (summer)time. 

Do you have your own reading recommendations for fellow educators? Please expand the list by adding some suggested reading material in the comment box.

The Tough Kid Tool Box, Jensen, Rhode and Reavis, Sopris West.

Struggles: Managing Resistance, Building Rapport, Maag, Sopris West.

School, family and community partnerships: Your handbook for action, 2nd edition, by J. Epstein, Corwin Press

Academic Language Notebooks: The Language of Math, (grades 3,4 and 5) Course Crafters Publications and Perfection Learning

Managing School Districts for High Performance, Childress, Elmore, Grossman and Johnson

The 4 Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive, Patrick Leoncioni

The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Leoncioni

The Strategic School by Miles and Frank

Updraft/Downdraft, Crawford and Dougherty

Better Learning Through Structured Teaching: A Framework for the Gradual Release of Responsibility, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey

Do you have any recommendations for summer reading?  Please add them here with a note about why you liked the book(s) or other reading material.

….but wait a minute. My state's proposal for Race to the Top money was just as innovative, ambitious and just as rigorous as Tennessee's application. So why does Tennessee walk away with $500 million while my state and school district get skunked?

"We put in for half a billion dollars with no expectations whatsoever of getting all that money," said Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen, rubbing it in. "We got it all."

A critical factor in Tennessee's success, we're told, is that the state had buy-in from virtually all its school districts and teacher unions. Buy-in is not an easy thing to pull off when your reform program has to include a plan for evaluating teachers based on their students' performance, a highly controversial and emotional issue for educators. Tennessee has committed to basing 50% of teacher/principal evaluations on student achievement data.

But other states among the 16 finalists had strong buy-in as well. So how did Tennessee set itself apart? I decided to take a second look at Tennessee's Race to the Top application. Or more specifically, I decided to take a look at the reviewers' comments on the state's application.

Not surprisingly, I soon saw that Tennessee had an unfair advantage.  In one word: Data.

Reviewers comments were peppered with references to the Tennessee Value Added Assessment System (TVAAS), a system that has been collecting data on student growth since the early 1990s.

Some sample comments:

"The State has a high quality plan to create a teacher and principal evaluation system centered on student achievement. The plan will build on the strength of having the most extensive longitudinal student achievement data system in the nation (TVAAS)."

"Tennessee has been a national leader in the use of value-added assessment to measure teacher effectiveness. The State's TVAAS system was put into place in the early 1990s. Not only has Tennessee invested substantial resources in its IT systems to enable the student-teacher linkages and calculate growth, teachers have a long history using these measures. …Teacher familiarity with value-added most likely will help the State secure educator buy-in as it moves forward in expanding the uses of these statistical models to inform human capital decisions."

"For nearly two decades, Tennessee has calculated growth measures for student growth through its TVAAS system. The State has linked student growth to teacher effectiveness and used it to inform decisions related to teacher employment. Tennessee can immediately begin to address the educator effectiveness measures called for under Race to the Top."

In its Race to the Top presentation to federal officials, the state said that it had "built the car (data system) before the road." Clearly, the state is about to build the highway.

The question of what makes a great teacher has become the hippest and hottest topic around.

In a recent, widely read New York Times article ( "Building a Better Teacher"), Doug Lemov of Uncommon Schools, a network of 16 charter schools in the Northeast, described his 5-year odyssey to answer that question. He began looking for special qualities that exceptional teachers shared, but instead came up with a taxonomy of 49 bite-sized effective practices for teachers that will be published in a highly anticipated book this spring (Teach Like a Champion).

Lemov noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn't expected to find, says the NY Times article. "What looked like natural born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. 'Stand still when you're giving direction,' a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don't do two things at once.'"

Helping students progress from one grade level to the next, the thinking goes, is not unlike safely flying an airplane from one airport to the next. Success may have less to do with the talent and aptitude of the pilot (teacher) but with whether he or she consistently follows proven effective practices in the field. Lemov amassed a collection of 700 video clips of outstanding teachers actually using the 49 techniques in their classrooms providing irrefutable evidence that they work with real students.

In The Atlantic magazine (What makes a great teacher?), Steven Farr of Teach for America, a nonprofit that recruits college graduates to spend two years teaching in low-income schools, describes his own quest for the secret formula. Working with Teach for America data on hundreds of thousands of students and their teachers and his own classroom observations, Farr and his colleagues made lists of specific teacher actions that fell under the high-level principles they had identified (e.g. setting big goals, involving families in the process). His findings are laid out in a new book called Teaching as Leadership.

The current issue of Educational Research Newsletter adds to this discussion by reporting on two studies. One is a study based on Teach for America data that identifies positive traits that predict teacher effectiveness. Another is a research article on a demonstration classroom that allows teachers to see how new strategies actually work in a classroom.

The demonstration classroom was set up to improve literacy practices in the district, reports a recent study in the journal, Professional Development in Education. Said one teacher who was an observer in the demo classroom: "..it is really hard to have someone tell you how to do something without seeing it. I needed to see it. I needed to actually observe someone doing it."

Recent best seller, The Checklist Manifesto, describes how airline pilots, heart surgeons and builders of skyscrapers have embraced the humble checklist as a pathway to excellence in their challenging, high-stakes professions. In trying to answer the question, what makes a great teacher, Farr and Lemov have provided teachers a checklist of specific practices they can follow to be more effective in the classroom.

Accentuating the positive is not as easy as it looks.

Surprisingly and not so surprisingly, schools and districts implementing Positive Behavior Support (PBS)  are finding that working with students with problem behaviors is not the most challenging part of implementing PBS.

The most challenging part is the most positive part--teaching behavioral expectations to all students and providing rewards and reinforcement to students who meet those expectations.

Except for laying down the ground rules at the start of each school year, educators are not used to devoting a lot of thought and effort to educating students about desirable behavior.

For hundreds of years, most educators have taken a reactive rather than a proactive approach to student behavior--expecting and largely ignoring good behavior and responding only to the negative behavior. Even the word "behavior" connotes an infraction, an interruption of the educational process.

Now educators must learn how to accentuate the positive, and it can feel like an unfamiliar and redundant process.

A recent study on how well Maryland schools were implementing PBS recommended that educators teach behavioral expectations in a similar way to academics--with lesson plans. The authors recommend that lessons  be reviewed on a daily basis for the first week of school, on a monthly basis thereafter, and after all vacations and breaks.

On the checklist they used to evaluate fidelity of implementation were these questions on defining and teaching behavioral expectations: Has the school agreed upon 3 to 5 positively stated rules that are publicly displayed in 8 to 10 locations? Does the school have a behavioral rewards system?

Don Kincaid, director of the Florida Positive Behavior Support Project at the University of South Florida, says elementary school teachers expect to teach behavior more than teachers in the upper grades. " A frequent response is, 'They should know how to do that (behave) before they come to see us.' That's a valid point. But the point is, they don't. We have to set up a system to make sure that we are still able to address positive behavior and teach appropriately. It is kind of like saying, 'they should know how to read before they come to us.'"

Read about the latest research study:
Maryland study finds biggest challenge of PBIS is accentuating the positive