A Summer Reading List for Teachers

We can't believe that Summer College for Teachers came and went so quickly! During our time collaborating with high school educators in June, we often talked about non-fiction texts that teachers can use to revise their prompts, in order to bridge the gap between high school and college writing. Here is a list of recommendations, complied by Brendon Votipka. Check out the selections below and use them to revised your prompts before the new school year begins!

Nonfiction Reading List

Compiled by Brendon Votipka, Rutgers Writing Program

Family

Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Commercialization of Intimate Life: Notes from Home and Work
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity

Fear

Susan Faludi, The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America

Chuck Klosterman, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined)
Maggie Nelson, The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Kurt Spellmeyer, Buddha at the Apocalypse: Awakening from a Culture of Destruction

Health
Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Identity

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights

Psychology

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life

Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression
Martha Stout, The Sociopath Next Door

Social Interaction

Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine

Janet A. Flammang, The Taste for Civilization: Food, Politics, and Civil Society

Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Technology & the Mind

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How Technology and Brain Science Will Transform Schools and Business for the 21st Century

Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other

Sherry Turkle, Simulation and Its Discontents

Writing, Thinking, and Communication

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, “They Say / I Say”: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing

bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, Writing Analytically

Deborah Tannen, The Argument Culture
Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations

College-Level Nonfiction Anthologies

Barclay Barios, Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers
Michelle J. Brazier, Points of Departure: A Collection of Contemporary Essays

Kurt Spellmeyer and Richard E. Miller, The New Humanities Reader

Teaching with Technology

Marc Cicchino discusses the many advantages of using Google in your classroom.

Marc Cicchino, the supervisor of English in Roxbury Public Schools and a faculty member at Rutgers University, spoke on June 29 at the Summer College for Teachers about teaching with technology.

Appropriately, Marc opened his presentation about technology by asking attending educators to pull out their cell phones, laptops, or tablets and jump right into a cel.ly conversation. Cel.ly is a great resource for educators, Mark said, because teachers can easily send out a question to students to take a poll, ask for anonymous feedback, and allow students to engage when they otherwise might not be able. For example, a conversation on cel.ly can allow student to engage with a video by making comments while it plays, allowing it to act as a backchannel. Additionally, cel.ly allows teachers to easily send out a message to the class, such as a bit of trivia or an important announcement.

The next resource Marc shared with teachers was called TodaysMeet, which allows teachers to easily set up a chatroom. Marc says a helpful use of TodaysMeet is that it can allow students in the outside ring of a Socratic Circle to become active participants in the conversation happening in the inside circle.

A Socratic Circle that could be enhanced by allowing the outer circle to comment using TodaysMeet. (Photo: Sturgis Soundings Magazine)

Then, Marc turned to a discussion about Google Docs, showing everyone in the room that there are even more incredible features available for free from Google than we had imagined. For example, did you know that you can check the revision history of a Google Doc that your student is using to turn in an assignment? Using the revision history, you can see if a student is copying and pasting large amounts of their work from an outside source, see if the student is editing after the due date, or check who is doing what portion of the work on a collaborative project.

Google also offers a Research button in the Tools menu, which allows students to search for and insert citations in a sidebar within their Google Doc. This feature is a game-changer because it makes researching significantly easier for students, and it saves teachers from reserving research time in the school computer lab, leaving more time for work in the classroom.

Finally, Marc showed educators how to use Add-Ons, including EasyBib Bibliography Creator for Google Docs and Doctopus and Flubaroo for Google Sheets. The EasyBib Bibliography Creator allows students to easily create their bibliography and cite sources using a simple sidebar within Docs. Doctopus instantly creates an organized system of folders in Google Drive for an entire class, based on a roaster entered in Google Sheets. Flubaroo grades quizzes given on Google Forms for you.

Remember, technology is only an advantage in the classroom if its use simplifies or enhances an activity. Marc reminded educators not to get caught in the trap of trying to use technology too often and actually making activities more complicated than they need to be.

The SAMR model explains the four positive ways that technology can work in the classroom.

Marc's presentation can be accessed online here. Take a look and check out even more tools you can use in the classroom.

Inspiring Mindfulness in the Classroom

On June 28, the second day of Summer College for Teachers, guest speaker Tim Brennan addressed educators. Tim has worked in education for fifty years, and has spent twenty-eight of those years as a superintendent. Despite his move to administration, Tim has never let a year go by without teaching an English class. "Once an English teacher, always an English teacher," he says.

Tim values his position as a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, but he commented that many students walk into his classroom overwhelmed. Students are addicted to their screens, including laptops, tablets, and phones, and this has negatively impacted their ability to focus. He says that the visual bombardment coming from our screens can be calmed with mindfulness meditation. Tim begins each one of his classes with two full minutes of silence, explaining to students that they have no obligation for those moments other than simply sitting and being aware that they are sitting.

Tim's students say that this mindfulness exercise helps students to get started in class with clear focus. This activity can also help students get started on a paper or assignment at home. For more information about mindfulness, check out the 60 Minutes video clip above, which Tim shared with educators at SCFT.

Summer College for Teachers Kicks Off with Discussion of Educational Goals in Democracy

Educators consider a passage written by philosopher Jacques Ranciere.

June 27 marked the first day of the annual Summer College for Teachers, hosted by the Rutgers Writing Program. Kurt Spellmeyer, chair of the Rutgers Writing Program, Regina Masiello, director of Expository Writing, and Brendon Votipka, the Plangere Coordinator and an Assistant Director in the Writing Program, welcomed New Jersey Educators with the first session of the day.

Kurt kicked off the discussion by reminding educators that our current educational system was developed in the nineteenth century and arguably has not moved forward since then. In fact, until as late as the conclusion of World War II, the average American had a ninth grade education. High school and college were distinctly separate institutions, and thinking that high school and college “populations and concerns” are separate remains a hindrance to education today.

“If we want education to survive—real education—we need to band together,” Kurt said of the collaboration between high school and college educators, which happens at Summer College for Teachers and should happen on a broader scale too.

The group also discussed the lack of stability in high schools as a problem in education today. It’s hard work for a high school departmental supervisor to spearhead a program and get that program off the ground. There is a relatively quick turnover of departmental supervisors, which means that each time a supervisor is replaced, the process of spearheading initiatives starts all over again.

Of course, a discussion of education in America would be incomplete without mention of the Common Core. Many in the room agreed that the idea behind the Common Core—an equal, free public education for all Americans—may be admirable, but the way that the standards were created and the way they are enforced don’t always add up with their goals. Educators wondered, where do the goals of Common Core and educators diverge?

“For me [as a student], literature was a door into a bigger world. I have to wonder about these students for whom standardized testing starts in the second grade,” Kurt said.

Kurt went on to share that, although Rutgers has one of the top ten history departments in the country, the department has experienced a 25% drop in enrollment in the last two years. The English department at Rutgers has not experienced quite the same drastic decline, but English departments across the country reveal a trend in universities: the humanities are losing popularity as a vocational mentality increases in students.

Educators discussed how we live in a climate of fear, where students enter career-focused majors such as engineering or business in the hopes of ensuring future security. This mentality ignores the fact that the humanities majors grow into the most cognitively flexible adults. In other words, humanities majors learn how to think critically and outside the box. Business majors consistently score the lowest in cognitive flexibility, Kurt said, and also report low worker satisfaction.

Session one wrapped up with a discussion of where education’s place in politics is—specifically in today’s democracy.

“What we do is inherently political because we change the way people look at the world,” Kurt said.

The group said that one important goal of humanities teachers in both high schools and colleges is to give students permission and a place to present their own ideas.

The session ended on an inspiring note, when one educator commented that sometimes, her students make her rethink her own opinions: “When they make me uncomfortable in my views, that’s when I know I’m in the perfect job for me.”

The second session of the day, Close Reading/Non-Fiction Prose Pedagogy, expanded on the notion that educators need to give their students permission to share their ideas. Regina spoke about her experience as the director of Expository Writing and explained that students in writing courses at Rutgers are exposed to conceptually rich non-fiction. Permission is given for students to share their ideas through the way the prompts are written; students are encouraged to enter into conversation with the texts they read, rather than regurgitate experts’ ideas.

Through an active pedagogy, educators teach students how to digest ideas or recognize that they do not necessarily agree with everything they may be taught.

The second session stressed the importance of revision in academic writing and thinking. Revision may make students uncomfortable because it forces them to have “flexibility of mind and tolerance of ambiguity,” Regina said.

For the remainder of day one, Regina and Brendon spoke to participants about other aspects of non-fiction prose pedagogy, including teaching grammar to students in the context of their own writing and using shared assessment criteria across a department, as Expos uses a shared assessment criteria across its hundreds of class sections. In the afternoon, Brendon led educators in free writing exercises and discussions so that they could put pedagogy into practice.

Summer College for Teachers: Links of Interest

The following links are among those we will discuss during the technology portion of our program for the Summer College for Teachers, August 2.


The Rutgers Writing Program

• Expos the MovieYou can find several videos about Expos at Rutgers at this location as well as at our website.
• Rutgers Writing Program website where you will find information about our classes, including Expository Writing (scroll to the bottom for downloads)
• NewHum website
• Plangere Writing Center
• Writers House

Teaching Expos 101 from Expos the Movie on Vimeo.


Common Core State Standards


For those wanting to learn more about the new Common Core, the following links may help:

• Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades 3–12
• Common Core State Standards
• Writing and the Common Core

Decision-Making and Critical Thinking Webliography
The following list is an experiment in curating internet readings for high school and college teachers.  We think that this may be a valuable way of making viable readings available for high school teachers of English so that they do not have to invest all of their Common Core "conversion" money in materials but can put it where it will really make a difference: in teacher training.  We are hoping to make a large number of webliographies available to teachers, along with collaborative tools for sharing assignments and other materials.

• Dan Ariely, "Painful Lessons" -- PDF download (January 30, 2008) This essay on the author's experience of being terribly burned became the introduction to his later book, Predictably Irrational.
• Sharon Begley, "I Can't Think!" (Newsweek, February 27, 2011)
• Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (The Atlantic, July / August 2008) Controversial when published, Carr's article presented his initial thoughts, later expanded in The Shallows, on the way Google has encouraged a generation of skimmers and not deep thinker.  See James Bowman's "Is Stupid Making Us Google?" for an interesting response.
• John Dewey, How We Think (widely available, including at the Internet Archive) A seminal work on thought and decision-making and how these should be the content of the school curriculum.
• David Dobbs, The Science of Success (The Atlantic,  December 2009) "Most of us have genes that make us as hardy as dandelions: able to take root and survive almost anywhere. A few of us, however, are more like the orchid: fragile and fickle, but capable of blooming spectacularly if given greenhouse care. So holds a provocative new theory of genetics, which asserts that the very genes that give us the most trouble as a species, causing behaviors that are self-destructive and antisocial, also underlie humankind’s phenomenal adaptability and evolutionary success. With a bad environment and poor parenting, orchid children can end up depressed, drug-addicted, or in jail—but with the right environment and good parenting, they can grow up to be society’s most creative, successful, and happy people."
• Nitika Garg and Jennifer Lerner, "Sadness and Consumption"
• Adam Gopnik, "The Information: How the Internet Gets Inside Us" (The New Yorker, February 14, 2011)
• Seunghee Han and Jennifer Lerner, "Decision Making"
• Jonah Lehrer, "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up." (Wired, December 21, 2009)
• Jonah Lehrer, "Don't: The Future of Self-Control."  (The New Yorker, May 18, 2009) This article revived interest in the now famous "marshmallow test" and what it has taught us about the importance of self-control.
• Maria Popova, "The Science of Choice: 5 Perspectives"
• Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Extract from Nudge (The Independent, March 22, 2009)

Blogging

• Blogs for Learning
  An excellent site maintained by Michigan State University devoted to using blogs in education.
• Inwords/Outwords by Anannya Dasgupta and students
  An example of using a blog to have students communicate with each other and share drafts.  The teacher gave every participant equal access to the blog to post.  You could also post questions and use the blog comments feature as a bulletin board for threaded discussion.  But enabling students to post to the blog had some interesting fringe benefits, such as their ability to share links to online material.
• College! by Michael Goeller
  In my research writing class last year, I had all students set up a project blog to track their progress throughout the semester and to give me many chances to intervene along the way.  I set up a blog myself that linked to all of their blogs.
• Sakai at Rutgers
  The home page of our open source course software.

Google Docs


One of the best ways to encourage revision and online collaboration is through Google Docs, which is part of the Google suite of tools.
Google Docs

Other Links

Jane E. Miller
Science teachers will find Dr. Miller's links under "Writing about Numbers" of value.

2011 Summer College for Teachers of Writing

For more information about the Writing Program Institute Summer College for Teachers, visit our website, which offers complete details and links to registration information.   Teachers completing the course receive 16 hours of professional development credit.