Breaking My Own Rule

I've broken my own rule in the last couple of weeks.  I have never been one to read more than one book at a time.  I start a book and finish it before starting another.  I do the same thing with magazines.  I even eat that way...one thing at a time.  I've broken that rule in the last couple of weeks however, by starting multiple books.  I read a couple of novels in one weekend for pleasure, but everything I'm reading right now is professional material.  Here's the run down...

If you read my blog for educators this week, I talked about this book Annual Growth For All Students; Catch-up Growth For Those Who Are Behind by Lynn Fielding, Nancy Kerr and Paul Rosier.  It is the study of an elementary school in Washington that had a large number of students struggling to meet state benchmarks and how they turned things around.  It was recommended by one of my literacy trainers as well as a teammate.  According to the American Legislative Exchange Council Oklahoma is 43rd in the national in educational performance.  Other reports list Oklahoma as slightly higher or lower if you look at specific subgroups, subjects or other educational factors.  While there are pockets of very successful districts in our state, the state as a whole is not performing as well as we could.  We have excellent potential, but we need to make some changes.  This book offers a unique perspective to making needed change.

Coaching for Balance:  How to Meet the Challenges of Literacy Coaching by Jan Miller Burkins is one of the first literacy coaching books that I bought a few years ago when I knew I wanted to pursue this as a career path.  It's also one of the first books about literacy coaching that was written by an active literacy coach.  I'm not very far into this one yet, but the practical suggestions that it provides for me in this new role are very helpful.  There are parts of it that reinforce what I already knew, and other parts that challenge me to think differently about some things.

(Hopefully this image isn't too blurry!)

This is another book that I received from my training trip to Oklahoma City, MAX Teaching with Reading and Writing:  Classroom Activities for Helping Students Learn New Subject Matter While Acquiring Literacy Skills.  It is written by a career teacher, Dr. Mark Forget, with activities for how to teach content such as science and social studies while also including literacy instruction.  I have a fifth grade teacher that has asked me specifically for these kinds of ideas.  In addition this type of integration is what Common Core State Standards are asking teachers to do.

This book is the one I will begin in the morning.  Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink was recommended by the same trainer that recommended Annual Growth.  I recently purchased a subscription to audible.com so that I can download books to listen to while I'm driving.  Tomorrow I have two and a half hours in the car (round trip) so I thought it was a perfect time to start this one.

As I've said before there are so many books and so little time!  I'm hoping with audible.com I can make my drive time more productive and entertaining, as well as being a good solution to my current vision issues.  I don't usually read (or listen to) more than one book at a time because I can't always make the mental leap from one to the other.  I've discovered it's a little easier to make these leaps because they are nonfiction rather than fiction.  There's no chance that I'm going to confuse characters or story lines with these texts.  

If you have other text recommendations for me feel free to let me know, Drive is six hours worth of listening and with my schedule being what it is this week, I'll be done with it by noon on Thursday.  I'll need a new audio book before the week is out!  What are you reading?