 Hello everyone! Hi! How are you this evening? Welcome to my Periscope and welcome if you are, I've already seen some familiar handles. Hello! If you are a replay viewer, hey Jason. If you're a replay viewer, welcome also. If you're here live, even better. And I am definitely seeing some names from just last week also. So fantastic. We are going to talk about summer. Hi Karla. We're going to talk about summer reading for us, not for the kids, although that's another interesting topic. Hey Gil. Hey Valerie. Oh my gosh, there are a lot of friends here today. That is fantastic. So yeah, you know what? Thursday. Let me talk to you really quickly. I'm doing sort of a bonus Periscope on Thursday. I'm involved in a project with Valerie Lewis and a bunch of other people called Pass the Scope. And this is not my project. I just got invited and I agreed to participate. But it's really cool because it's a bunch of people who are educators or yeah, I mean educators are related to education in some way. And we're all doing these little short Periscopes all day on Thursday. So I am going to start publicizing that on Twitter as soon as this is done basically because I didn't want to get the too confused. But we're all going to talk about summer learning. And so it's just going to be neat. It's going to kind of run all day long. So if Jason actually just shared the hashtag a second ago, it's just hashtag pass the scope. So if you look for that on Twitter, you'll find probably a schedule and some other information. But the people who are periscoping are kind of all across the globe. So it's going to be a fun time. I'm a little nervous that some things may not work. But I think mine is at, it's in the middle of the day. But Valerie probably knows what it is. It's in the middle of the day. It's not at this time. Okay. So today, as I said, we're going to talk about some of my recommendations for summer reading for teachers, some great books. And at the end of this Periscope, I am going to announce my book pick for the Cult of Pedagogy Summer Book Study. Because every summer for the last two summers now, I've chosen a book and I'll read it. And the second year I interviewed the author. And this year I'm interviewing the author too. And it's just, it's just what I'm really kind of focusing on for my own learning this summer. And I invite readers to join me and talk about how they're experiencing the book and everything like that. So I'm going to announce that. I'm very excited because it's a, it's a departure from what we've done the last two summers. But I'm going to recommend some other fantastic books because not everybody needs the same stuff. So if you want your surprise to be spoiled, or if you just want to check out the links to these books later, then you can go to my Periscope archive, which is cultofpedagogy.com slash periscope. And it's already there, the list of books that I'm going to talk about tonight. And there are links to all of them because I've done reviews of all of these books except for the very last one, which I'm going to be reviewing this summer. So you can go there and find out. But I am going to get started with my first book. It is, and I'm going to do the one for this summer last. Okay, my first book is actually the first book I ever reviewed for cultofpedagogy. It is called How to Talk So Kids Can Learn. And it is by Adele Faber and Elaine Maslisch. And I used to say that this is the book that I would give teachers if I had to pick only one book. Thank you, Gil. If I had only one book to hand to teachers, it would be this. And it's because I've always believed that there's a lot to the way that we speak to children, the words that we choose to use. And so I just saw a screenshot. Here it is. How to talk so kids can learn. This is not a new book. This has been around quite a while now. And I actually have a quote on my site by another educator named Heim Jeno. It's about what you say to your kid when they forget their umbrella. Anyway, they're sort of from the same collection of people. They kind of worked with Heim Jeno. Anyway, here's what I love about this book. They basically talk about different classroom situations. I think this would be a really good book for elementary or middle or high school. Age does not matter here. But if you're noticing that teachers are getting into a lot of spats with kids, or you're finding all these kids are just disrespectful, or my kids don't pay attention or whatever, they'll take situations and they'll break them down and they use cartoons. Let me just show you real quickly. They show you what teachers typically say and what you could say instead. Well, audio is gone. I hope it comes back for some people. Can everybody else hear me? Or is it just in one area? Okay, hopefully it's only just blipped down for a little bit. So cartoons are basically, don't do this, do this, don't do this, do this, which makes it super easy. The whole book is not in cartoons. I mean, they definitely write out a lot of stuff. But this one, I just absolutely love it. There is a link to it in the Periscope archive called to pedagogy.com slash periscope. And you can link to a more comprehensive review of this book. Okay, that's the first one. The second one, I wish a lot more people besides just teachers would read this one. It is called Presentation Zen. And this would be a fantastic one for a book study for teachers who use a lot of PowerPoint or Google Slides or what is the Mac one? Okay, it's the Mac version of PowerPoint, whatever that thing. Okay, no, okay, because there are so many bad presentations out there. Thank you. And what this book does basically anybody who's ever really read this thinks everybody should read it. This gentleman Gar Reynolds has basically taken the concept of giving he basically he wants to fight against bad PowerPoints and that what we all do is we fill up our PowerPoints with tons and tons of text. And we bore the crap out of our audience in this in our case, it's our students. And we don't give engaging presentations. And so what he what he does is he actually takes pictures of slides. I should have actually bookmarked this, but he'll take pictures of slides. Here's an example of what he'll do. Here is an example of a slide that he thinks is horrible because there's just too much crap going on in the background and everything. And he shows you how to clean it up and make it really, really simple. And yes, I did do a screencast on this one a long time ago, where I basically just took one of my own PowerPoint slides and I kind of applied presentations and it to show how if we make things more clean and simple and put really compelling images and fewer bits of text that we can really draw our audience in much more. And our presentation should be more about us talking and engaging with our audience than just reading off of our slides. So this one I would just the only problem with doing this this summer is that you are going to then go to all of your PowerPoints and say, Oh crap, now I have to redo all my PowerPoints. But that's not a bad thing to happen to my sister when I made her read this. Okay, that's the second book. The third book. I have it on. I got it on Kindle so I don't have it. I have it just on my Kindle. So I am going to Jason that happened to you. I'm going to turn my phone around and just show it to you. This book is called Awakened. And this is by my friend Angela Watson. Change your mindset to transform your teaching. This one, man, she's written a couple of books. But this one really had such a powerful effect on me just in my day to day life. And she really, really gets into how the way that we think about things in our head can really, really impact how we experience teaching and how we treat our students and how worn out we get and so many of the other aspects of teaching. I'm going to go ahead and flip this around now. That that can make teaching unpleasant for teachers and can make it a struggle. She really, really breaks down the self talk that we do. And so that would be a great study for a group of teachers that's just feeling burned out and just not into it and counting the days until retirement. Get together with a small group of other teachers and say we are going to we're determined to have a different mindset next year Awakened would be a fantastic book for that. Okay, the next one is actually the very first book that I did 40 hour work week course, we're going to get into that. Oh, yeah, that's a that's a fantastic program that Angela does. My very first book that I ever did a summer book study was this one called understanding by design. And this is kind of a classic at this point. If you have ever heard of the concept of backward design, this is this is much more of a nerdy teacher kind of academic book. This is not about our emotions or anything. This is about how to actually plan instruction. We pull it up there. Surely most of you have probably heard of this by this point. But backward design being just instead of planning, we're going to do this activity and this activity and this one, and then I'm going to create a test based on whatever we did. Yes, thank you. It is by Grant weight the late Grant Wiggins. He passed away about a year ago, I think now and Jay McTie. So it's a classic book. Instead of planning activities and then an assessment. What we do is we start by planning the assessment first, planning out what do we want our students to be able to do by the end of this unit. And then we work backwards to okay, what do we need to be doing with them in order for them to be successful on that assessment, we plan a good assessment that's really going to measure what we want them to be able to know or do. This one is I would recommend this to people who are up for a challenge because it's not light reading. It's not fun reading sometimes. But man, it will just blow your mind in terms of what it'll do is it will really make you feel as if you're giving quality instruction, because you sort of have the proof. And and really, I tried to teach this to undergraduates learning how to be teachers, and they had trouble with it. So I think it's better for experienced teachers who already understand some things about teaching. And then I think you can handle this. This is pretty much pretty advanced stuff. Understanding by design. Okay, next one. Thanks for all the hearts, by the way, if you're new to Periscope, those hearts are from people just tapping on the screen. And it's just nice. Thank you. Okay, the next one, this was my summer reading book last summer. And talk about another book that's going to blow your mind, make it stick by Peter Brown, Henry Rotiger and Mark McDaniel. And I interviewed one of the authors last summer, Peter Brown. This is another one that is all about how the brain actually works, and why the way we teach often does not match what we know about the brain. Fantastic, fantastic book. Also kind of a challenging read. But again, I mean, this one to me, I'd say along with understanding my design, just if you want to really consider yourself a knowledgeable educator who's really working with what we know about how people learn. This is a great one. One of the tips that I learned from this book is that we need to give our kids frequent quizzes, low stakes quizzes on things. In other words, like if you ever learn something and you say to somebody, quiz me, quiz me on that. It's because you want to be kind of tested, the act of being sort of tested on something, it actually creates new neural pathways, as opposed to teaching something for three, four, five weeks and then giving a big test at the end. What they recommend is that you give lots of little mini quizzes on the way because that actually helps students learn better. That is just one of the things. I probably learned six really significant things from this book, though. Again, I've got a full review. I interviewed the author and if you like watching me on Periscope, I kind of did. I didn't have Periscope yet then, but I kind of did Periscope style chapter reviews last summer, and I saved those recordings. And so that's on there. If you go to this link on my Periscope archive, you'll see I've got these chapter by chapter reflections. So if you wanted to do a book study of this one with your colleagues, you could go through the reflections with me on those. Top three books I think everyone should read. I don't know if I can do that one. That's a good question. I've got two more. Okay. Okay, this one, this is a little bit of a narcissistic moment. I wrote this one. This one is not difficult reading at all. This is the opposite of difficult reading. This is a book that I wrote with my friend Mark Barnes. And we put it out last summer and it is called Hacking Education 10 Quick Fixes for Every School. This is just good ideas for solving problems in schools. Simple as that. Almost none of it is really like heavy duty pedagogy stuff. It's like how do we solve the problem of teachers not having enough time to grade during the school day? How do we solve the problem of insufficient professional development? How do we solve the problem of long boring meetings? And we give these super easy, cheap, affordable solutions for things that you have laying around in your school right now. So hang on one second. I am not going to get naked. So this is another one. Most people who read this, hey, good to meet you. Most people who read this say that they read it in like an hour. I mean, it's 100 in some pages, but it's just, we tried to make it a super easy digestible read. So that's another one. Okay, I am ready to make my big announcement now of the book that I am going to be, that I chose for this summer. And I was really excited to find this because I know that a lot of people have a lot of different aspects of teaching that they are having trouble with, you know, whether it's like they want to learn more about blended learning or they want to learn more about technology or they want to, you know, get better at differentiation. And I want to solve all those problems too. But then I came across this book, which was just published about a month ago. I am going to put it on the screen because again, I grabbed it on my Kindle immediately. And so I don't actually have the book in my hand. Thank you for the drum roll, Valerie. I'm going to make the screen a little bit smaller. And I'm going to flip my screen around. It is called Hey, flip. I'm ready for a screenshot too. Okay, there it is. It is called push out the criminalization of black girls in schools by Monique W. Morris. And this book is fantastic. I think it's such an important book because what Dr. Morris has done is she spent four years interviewing young black women and black girls about their experiences in school and about the the trend of over criminalizing over policing, zero tolerance, tolerance policies that have basically landed a lot of these girls either in jail or in other confinement types of situations. A lot of times in the sex trade. A lot of times in other situations where their potential is just absolutely being squashed. So I'm going to flip this around. I just got the question, how did this book come to my attention? Sometimes when I'm looking for summer books, I will go to Amazon and I'll look for stuff that's about to be released or is newly released. You know, the one I did the first summer was was an old book. I just loved it and thought every teacher should read it. But for the next two, I look for sort of newer things that not everybody was reading. And when I saw this, I just I used to work in the greater DC area. That's where I had my first teaching job. And I had a lot of black female students. And I had a lot of students that I mean, I had a lot of students that I had trouble reaching in general. But I can remember having a curiosity about my black female students that I felt like I could not always reach them. And I worried about their futures. And when I started to read, I didn't want to announce this yet, because I wanted to read it a little bit and make sure that it was something that I could recommend. And man, she is just spot on. And I just interviewed her the other day for my podcast. We're going to the way that we're going to do this book is on July 3. And there's a link to all this information on my podcast archive. I on July 3 is when I'm going to put my own review of the book. There's going to be my own reflections of it. I may even be inviting a few people to give their reflections also. Yes, I think this book will refer to minority students. It's about black girls. And then I will also be publishing that day on July 3, my interview with Monique Morris where we talk about the book, we get into some of the concepts a little. I ask her some questions that I think teachers are going to have. And then I'm going to invite you all to give your comments after the blog post. We're going to just keep it really simple. But Dr. Morris has also agreed to participate in the comments. So after we have our discussion, then when whenever people comment or ask questions, she's going to sort of be hanging out there over the next week or so to sort of engage with people. So I'm just really excited because I feel like we have given a lot of attention to the school to prison pipeline in terms of young black males. And what she has done is said, yes, that is a big issue. A lot of people are handling it. I want to now turn the lens on young black girls and see how their needs are not necessarily met by the same blanket that we throw on trying to solve the school to prison pipeline. She gets into restorative practices. She talks a little bit about PBIS if you're familiar with that. Yes, Mariel, every summer I choose a book for my own website summer book study. And so this summer I'll show it one more time for anybody who was a late comer. The book that I chose for this summer is called push out the criminalization of black girls in schools. Now if you would like a link to this, all you need to do is go to cultopetagogy.com slash periscope. And that is where I keep my links to everything. And I've got a page now that announces this as my book. One other thing about push out to whenever someone buys a book through my website, I get a little commission from Amazon. It's like a 6% commission on any purchase made. It's sort of like them thanking me for advertising books. So what I've decided to do I asked Monique Morris to recommend a charity that I could donate all of that commission to that would sort of serve these the same needs. So she recommended a charity in Chicago called along walk home, and they work to to sort of solve the problem of violence against young girls and women with art. I put a link to that also on the information page. So is the link by my bio the link to... Okay, I'll see if I can answer that question again as somebody looking for the link. The way that I do my Periscope Archive is I just put the most recent periscope. So what there is today is just a list of all the books that I just recommended. Here I will show you. I will flip it around and I will show you. So here's the site. There's the URL right there called to pedagogy.com slash Periscope. And then May 17th is right there. And then here's all the books that I just recommended. And it includes this last one push out the criminalization of black girls in school. So if you click that, you will go to this page where I am explaining that this is my pick and how you can get it. That link straight to Amazon. And so if you buy it through there, I will get that commission and then I will be able to forward that over to the charity along Walk Home. So those are my recommendations for summer reading. What else did I want to say? Nothing. If you're just meeting me for the first time, dude, you have no idea. I have so much stuff for you. If you're a teacher, if you're interested in education, go to cultsofpedagogy.com. That's cults, C-U-L-T-O-F and pedagogy is P-E-D-A-G-O-G-Y dot com. And I spent all my time doing stuff for teachers. So you're in for a treat. Thank you very much. I will be back next week and then I'm going to be taking a short break from Periscopes for a while. So join me next week. I will see you then. And thank you all so very much for hanging out with me tonight.