Summertime: Renewal, Reading, and Reflection

I’m staring at our suitcases. 46 hours of travel provides for a lot of time to read. What needs to be on my Kindle or packed in my bag? Aside from the next book in the Dr. Siri mystery series and Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, I’m trying to sort out my “professional reading” for the summer. I have 3 goals for next year that all revolve around developing more awareness and powerful learning mindsets. So this is what I have so far for supporting my intentions:

1. Books to boost our Who We Are Unit and our classroom practice of Mindfulness: Happy Teachers Change the World  and The Brain Power Classroom
2. Books to help create more “connective tissue” with students and staff, that center around kindness and care: The Nurtured Heart Approach: Transforming the Difficult Child and Conversations Worth Having: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Fuel Productive and Meaningful Engagement and The Culture Code.
3. Books that help support developing a culture of authentic writing and reading: Projecting Possibilities: The How, What, and Why of Designing Units of Study, K-5 and Growing Readers by Kathy Collins and Passionate Readers by Pernille Ripp. (I’m hoping to get a lot of inspiration of how we can reframe the Workshop model so we can make it more PYP-ish with developing units of study around the conceptual understandings using the conceptual understandings from  the Language Scope and Sequence)

And then I hope that A.J. Juliani’s new book on Project Based Learning comes out because his ideas always inspire me. I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can “combine” transdisciplinary themes and extend timelines, using a project-based learning approach. For next year, we have “bundled” a few units next to each other so that the conceptual understandings connect and build upon one another for a sustainable city project, but I’m always wondering how else we might approach the enhancements to the PYP since we have more flexibility. I’d like to do some more thinking around this.

Of course, there are quite a few blogs that I have to go back and re-read some posts (and find some new ones). So many awesome IB blogs these days that inspire and provoke us!

So, I hope everyone has a lovely summer, full of rest, renewal and reflections (and perhaps some reading). I know most of us strive to be at least 1% more awesome every year so I’m sure that reaching out for the great ideas out there can spark new thinking and approaches to learning in our schools for next year.