In The Years That Really Matter: How College Makes or Breaks Us, author Paul Tough augments his consistently sharp commentary on mobility, opportunity, and equity—this time with a focus on higher education. Tough's book asks what it takes to transition from one economic class to another. More precisely, he shines a brilliant light on the fact that, while we assume higher education is a major route for anyone to alter the conditions of life, that path is actually filled with obstacles that the colleges themselves control and have lower-than-the-needed motivation to change. By effectively combining research with stories of high-achieving students from economically-challenged families, Tough illustrates that while higher education has the potential to be a powerful driver for lifting students from poverty to the middle class, the opposite is often true—it instead reinforces a rigid social hierarchy that prevents overcoming birth circumstances. He tackles the SAT, "elite" colleges' dependence on admitting rich and not just high-scoring students, and admissions decisions that favor affluence. There are lessons here for our schools, both in terms of our own decisions and how to identify, call out, and resist the elitism of colleges for which we are preparing our students.

Pandemic teaching is nothing if not a suitable challenge for challenging times, and after months of trial and error, new pedagogies and practices have begun to emerge. In "Time to Power-Up Teaching Practice," Jill Harrison Berg employs a systems approach to respond to the question, "What is the essence of powerful teaching?" She cites the Five Core Propositions of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards of 2016 that specify what, exactly, powerful teaching entails: teacher commitment to students and student learning; pedagogical and content knowledge; collaborative assessment and monitoring of student learning; systems thinking about pedagogy; and teacher engagement in learning communities. Interviewing a number of teachers in public, charter, and magnet schools, Madeline Will, of Education Week, likewise collates "6 Lessons Learned About Better Teaching During the Pandemic," including the importance of teacher flexibility; using personalized learning pedagogies; and providing guidance for students about how to manage their schedules and complete their work. Even with these positive shifts to teaching and learning amid the pandemic, as Josh Benjamin captures so beautifully in his Boston Globe article, physical distance, and the quiet that comes with it, can not only challenge social learning theory, but also make us sad. "It is dystopically silent," Benjamin says of his classroom, "as if it is awaiting a future team of archaeologists to draw conclusions about a past civilization of small people who struggled to add and whose pencils often broke." Muting ourselves and others over Zoom creates eerie pockets of silence and disassociation where cacophony and connection was once a norm. Benjamin misses not just the joyful noises of learning, but the arguments too: "When children argue, they learn about themselves and the people around them." For Benjamin and many other teachers, despite many pedagogical gains, the silence of learning this fall has been deafening.

In her October podcast of Unlocking Us, Brené Brown chats with Drs. Emily and Amelia Nagoski, twin sisters and authors of Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle. This conversation not only provides simple guidance for those suffering an overload of stress—um, everyone?—but also shares insightful anecdotes from the lived experience of all three participants. While mindfulness garners much popular attention these days, the Nagoskis argue that certain physical activities are key to completing the stress cycle and avoiding stuck emotional states. Physical exertion, deep breathing, affection, positive social interaction, creative expression, or "a big old cry" signal to our brain's primitive safety systems that the threat has receded and we can relax the stress response. In a moment of intense and seemingly continuous global stress, the Nagoskis urge us not to avoid stress—impossible—but, rather, to navigate this inevitable terrain armed with the knowledge that our bodies are equipped to recover and move forward. While the topic is urgent and necessary, the conversation flows smoothly as Brown prompts the Nagoskis to dig beneath their book and share what drove them towards this topic. If you find yourself both consumed by stress and without the opportunity to crack a book, this might be the most beneficial fifty minutes you could invest in yourself, all while addressing those pesky house chores.

Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, reviewed in the September 2020 Klingbrief, is an extraordinarily valuable resource for any anti-racist educator. Wilkerson, like Ibram X. Kendi, offers powerful analogies and language to enable discussions among students about race and systems of oppression, while avoiding the traps of guilt, shame, and paralysis that can sometimes occur. Many educators, due to the constraints of time and its level of difficulty, cannot use Caste in its entirety with high school students. Two powerful interviews with Professor Wilkerson, one with Terry Gross on Fresh Air and the other with Preet Bhahara on his podcast, Stay Tuned, are excellent educational onramps to bring younger students to the ideas in Caste. Wilkerson's conversations with these expert interviewers will outline for students the central arguments she makes in the book about the responsibility each of us has to face the past, though we did not create it, and to do our part to heal, fix, and dismantle systemic injustice. Wilkerson is an engaging, clear voice and her talent as a teacher is underscored as she describes the central argument that, in American society, caste is the bones, race is the skin, and class is the clothes.

Philosopher Kate Manne has become an important voice in the conversation around misogyny and systemic inequality. In Entitled, she builds on the philosophical foundations she laid out in 2017's Down Girl to offer a clear-eyed, bracing tour through contemporary forms of misogyny, from politics, to families, to the institutions in which we all move. In short, trenchant chapters, Manne shows just how pervasive and stultifying misogyny can be while illuminating important concepts like "mansplaining," "gaslighting," and (her own coinage) "himpathy." Readers will appreciate the power of Manne's analysis to foster the kind of productive discomfort and inward reflection necessary for unlearning misogynistic ways of thinking and developing more equitable, fair-minded understandings of gender, power, and privilege. While the book's main arguments signal just how much progress is left to be achieved when it comes to gender equity, Manne's final chapter, a sort of wish list for her young daughter, offers a note of hopefulness about the current moment—and rising generation—and the potential for transformative change. Teachers and school leaders need a robust understanding of misogyny, and Entitled is a perfect crash course.

"Polarization is not a result of disagreement. It is a result of disconnection." This text by Nancy Kline offers a new and alternative explanation for our current national and global struggle—and a new and alternative antidote. Excerpted from her recent book, The Promise That Changes Everything: I Won't Interrupt You, Kline's article calls for a paradigm shift in our way of being. Inviting us to consider the shocking prevalence of interruption in politics, the workplace, and our personal relationships, Kline proposes a "sustaining of generative attention" in its place. Relatedly, in her recent book, You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters, reviewed in the March 2020 Klingbrief, Kate Murphy investigates what she sees as a crisis of listening in our world and how we're all suffering for lack of real listening and being listened to. Listening, misunderstood as weaker than talking, Murphy argues, is the antidote to our political and social woes. She details what we're losing and missing as well as what we have to gain: curiosity, discovery, and connection. Much has been said and written about listening, of course, yet Kline's and Murphy's texts offer some surprises, fresh insights, and new syntheses of present dilemmas. Though this thought-provoking article and book are not explicitly about education, they couldn't be more relevant for educators or anyone interested in learning.

Kay Traille's Hearing Their Voices: Teaching History to Students of Color is an important, timely read for all educators, not just history teachers. Traille's methodical, research-supported treatise is an invitation for teachers to more deliberately acknowledge, appreciate, and account for students' pre-conceived understanding of their subject areas. Noting that "history as a discipline lags behind subjects like mathematics" in reframing textbooks and approaches around students' misconceptions, Traille's research attempts to fill in that gap while zooming out to articulate a pedagogical approach that will prove useful to history teachers, DEI practitioners, and curriculum designers. Educators looking for guidance on how to approach controversial issues and insight into incorporating social-emotional learning into their curriculum will find many helpful tips and suggestions in this book. Ultimately, this insightful text is a handbook for teachers who want "to understand both how our students think and how our students feel." For educators, there might not be anything more important on which to focus.