Helping students understand events around the world has never been more challenging or more urgent, and many schools are understandably struggling to frame and contextualize recent events in the Middle East. Indeed, in this fraught moment, schools need to be prepared to hold space and to offer strategies for reflection, developing understanding, and enhancing students’ tolerance for complexity all while deepening students’ sense of empathy, compassion, and humanism. The complexity of this particular moment means that teachers need to approach conversations with nuance, humility, and care for those impacted by these events. While no one resource can fully prepare teachers to tackle these discussions, Facing History and Ourselves, whose stated goals are to support students and teachers as they “make sense of the world around them and become informed and active participants in a democracy,” offers a good starting place to help teachers and schools frame conversations and keep students informed, reflective, and supported as they grapple with these developments. Their resources, grounded in their research-supported methodology and curricular practices, offer a framework for reflection as well as connections to curricular material to help teachers approach conversations about Antisemitism, Islamophobia, and the broader geo-political context, all while encouraging students to develop effective media and research habits to avoid the social media churn. From journaling prompts to discussion points, teachers will find a wealth of useful content for thinking through how to approach these delicate conversations with students. Exploring Facing History’s broader resource database will also facilitate connecting recent events to other moments in the world’s history and can help students contextualize, connect, and, ultimately, arrive at a place of a deeper understanding as well as a sense of their own responsibilities to engage and participate.

School Clothes challenges historical stereotypes faced by Black students in the U.S., offering a profound reevaluation of their experiences. Through meticulous scholarship, it amplifies the voices of African American youth and contributes significantly to the narrative of Black education. The book features notable figures like Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Angela Davis during their primary and secondary school years, using their voices as primary sources to underscore that Black students transcend historical adversity. The text takes readers on a historical journey, showcasing how Black youth, supported by their families, resisted the suppression of Black American education. Alexander Crummell's pursuit of education in the antebellum North, Mary McLeod Bethune's innovative "singing schools," and Yvonne Divans Hutchinson's transformation into an educator all exemplify this resistance. School Clothes presents historical student perspectives on the intentional barriers and aggression against Black youth in education. It highlights the way covert efforts, from the classroom to the boardroom, continue to affect Black students today. These narratives counter the history of anti-assembly laws during enslavement acknowledging that the right to assemble for Black people has always been a challenged privilege persisting in today's educational landscape. Givens is partnering with the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and is currently working with secondary school teachers of English and African American Studies to plan a teaching guide for educators to use the book in their classrooms. More information will be forthcoming about these lessons from https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/.

Journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s new book on the dangers of a hyper-competitive adolescence features harrowing vignettes. The student-athlete runs with her eyes closed to compensate for sleep lost to endless studying for an advanced course load. The suburban mom obsessively micromanages her son’s every academic and extracurricular move, cultivating the “spike” that will help him stick out in college admissions, simultaneously alienating the anxious boy. Wallace heartbreakingly paints a picture of exhausted and stressed out Gen Zs and Alphas. A 4.0 GPA isn’t enough, it must be a 4.8. Seven AP courses aren’t enough, it must be 10 APs, and with top scores in all. Varsity athletics aren’t enough, it must be year-round dedication to the sport, from a very early age, with awards, accolades, and a strong social media following. Achievement culture has taught today’s kids that they do not personally matter apart from their achievements. These messages are reinforced, sometimes unknowingly, by well-meaning parents, and certainly by social media and our race-to-the-top culture. Though directed primarily at parents, this book can help educators better understand the motivations and fears of their achievement-oriented families. Chapters detail action plans and resources. Though it may sound like we as a society are past the point of no return, much of Wallace’s book actually reads as a how-to. How to help parents confront grind culture and hyper-competitiveness. How to help kids find value and meaning in themselves and the world around them. And how to unlock a sense of collective belonging in a world seemingly hyper-focused on individual accomplishment at seemingly any cost.

Readers of Eugenia Cheng welcome her provocative, passionately held, and remarkably articulate arguments for seeing math differently. In her newest book, this globally recognized professor of math, and also scientist in residence at the Art Institute of Chicago, argues for the power of refocusing on mathematical questions rather than answers. This book is neither a new curriculum nor a suggestion of another swing through the math wars. It is a simple treatise on human curiosity and the value of taking an inquiry approach to reduce math phobia and introduce delight in seeing in math a way that is open to any question, that is variable and fluid, and that asks no one to hold back a query because it might be wrong. Each chapter begins with a question that any one of our students, at any stage, might ask. Why isn’t 1 a prime number? Or why does 1+1=2? Cheng reminds us that, as a core strength of our brains, math jumps the margins of a single subject and enters a space where many kinds of thinkers, indeed almost every student, can feel at home. She includes personal stories, optimism, and words of encouragement that speak directly to educators in schools where teachers have enough autonomy to try something tested, robust, and also new. As helpful as this book will be to creative teachers, it could also speak directly to students and parents. It steers a course forward, removing obstacles, augmenting understanding, and building the joy of mastery while maintaining an honest regard for mystery, struggle, and the courage to wonder.

As many schools aim to build diverse communities, our educational spaces will need to be more inclusive of multilingual persons. Language is a powerful medium of self-expression, and requiring that individuals forgo the use of their home languages and dialects in schools can alienate underrepresented students and teachers and contribute to perpetuation of negative stereotypes. Nousak and Harvey reflect on their journeys as rural Midwesterners in academia and their experiences of codeswitching in response to social pressures to speak Standardized American English. In service of not being unfairly judged, the authors recall their efforts to dampen aspects of their linguistic identities in favor of using Standardized American English, which is often deemed to be more socially acceptable. They opine that this acceptance of Standardized American English as the language of schools fosters an oppressive environment for minority group members where the message that individuals from those backgrounds do not belong is reinforced. While the authors grapple primarily with linguistic inclusivity from the perspective of white rural educators, their musings invite us to broadly examine the policies we implement in our schools to help all individuals feel proud of their linguistic heritages and to open a more contentious conversation about how we define academic language.

Grading and assessment are education’s black box. They are vital to how schools run, yet myriad attempts to improve their overall functionality have foundered. In Off the Mark, Jack Schneider and Ethan Hutt identify some causes of wayward reforms and chart a different path forward. Their study enters a long-running and frequently divisive debate, spilling out into the policymaking arena and beyond, about how schools and states assess student learning. Educators and school leaders will not be surprised by many findings: grades incentivize the wrong things and often reinforce inequities, while experiments with alternative approaches generate fierce resistance from parents and students. We have a love/hate relationship with grades and assessment; they play critical and specific functions in our educational system by motivating, communicating, and synchronizing. Any new model must continue to fulfill these roles, they argue, or it will not take hold. Theirs is a global story. Countries from Cameroon to Norway struggle with a similar tension: grades are necessary, but they carry muddled messages. With a systems-thinking approach, Schneider and Hutt deftly isolate micro- and macro-level forces influencing grading practices. Throughout, they straddle pragmatism and idealism, calling on readers to resist unreasonable revolutionary changes (and their unintended consequences) while examining what lessons we might glean from one of the most dynamic learning environments: the kindergarten classroom.

Richard V. Reeves’ recent book states that while men at the top of the economic, social, and political ladders are doing well and thriving, men in general, particularly black and poor boys and men, are not. Supporting his claims with statistics and other data collected through years of deep research, Reeves shows how men are falling behind in school, the labor market, the economy, and the household (as absent fathers). Reeves puts forth concrete solutions to the problems he discusses, including approaching the raising of boys into men with both nature and nurture in mind. Of relevance to the education sector, Reeves proposes redshirting all boys, or having all boys enter school a year later than girls to calculate for the developmental gap in maturity that seemingly causes many boys in school to fall behind their female peers academically. Reeves also asserts that there needs to be more men in HEAL – health, education, administration, and literacy – occupations for three distinct reasons: traditional male occupations are in decline; diversifying these professions would help to meet the growing demand for labor; and more males in these professions would make it more likely for boys and men to find male providers of those services. This book offers a unique perspective on the problems facing everyday boys and men and concrete suggestions for solutions that can be helpful in an educational context, especially for those teachers of young boys and men.

What educator doesn’t wonder if they are creative enough in their classroom, especially in the age of AI? Into this shadowed moment of doubt, Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being sheds a beam of light that truly comforts. His advice to readers in this unique collection of short chapters and poems is plentiful, much of it salient for both teachers and students. Rubin argues that without doing anything special, through our engagement, we are more than enough. “Through the ordinary state of being,” Rubin writes, “we’re already creators in the most profound way, creating our experience of reality and composing the world we perceive.” With our everyday gestures, “we are all living as artists,” creating new things all the time. Rubin therefore advises us to be discerning: “because there’s an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in” – including what we read, what we think about, and those with whom we surround ourselves. There is likely no work more important today than helping the next generation to be sifters of the seemingly infinite source material in their world in order to consciously create and contribute.