Professional Learning

Crowdsourcing a Personal Learning Network: A Reading List

What’s on your reading list? Consider adding these top recommendations for blogs, books, and other “summer reading” to your reading list this year. Finding time to read can be daunting, but the insight you’ll gain—and the quiet break from “doing” that you’ll create for yourself—may just be worth it. Many NGLC schools build quiet time for reading into the daily schedule for students; we need to give ourselves permission to create space and time within our own daily schedules for quiet learning.

A huge thanks to the NGLC grantees and partners who contributed to this list—they are named below. Their recommendations include non-education reads alongside and interweaved between education-related options. A good reminder that inspiration and new ideas can come from anywhere.

Please join in: share your most inspiring reads at #NGLCchat.

What Blogs Do You Read?

• American Youth Policy Forum
• BlendMyLearning and EdSurge “Refreshing sites to visit in order to read about lessons learned, best practices, and innovations in the EdTech world.”
• Brain Pickings “Maria Popova’s take on what matters in the world and why Whitney Tilson keeps fueling the outrage.”
• Annie Murphy Paul’s Brilliant
• Chalkbeat
• Christensen Institute “Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and the group from the Christensen Institute always thoughtfully underpin their opinions with solid research.”
• CompetencyWorks
• Educating Modern Learners “Lovelovelove it. I was crushed to hear they may be sunsetting it.”
• EducationNext
• EdWeek blogs
• Getting Smart “Tom VanderArk and his Getting Smart team summarize and capture prevailing trends in our industry well.”
• Grant Wiggins “I followed his blog regularly.”
• HubSpot Marketing Blog
• Impatient Optimists
• Inc
• JFF
• Learning Deeply, EdWeek
• Mark Barnes
• MindShift
• Springpoint blog “Updates about their schools and tools for new school model design.”
• Whiteboard Advisors
• Blogs highlighted in news services provided by: Afton Partners, Educate Now, EdWeek, Illinois Network of Charter Schools, Advance Illinois, Real Clear Education.

What's on Your Summer Reading List?

• A Democratic Constitution for Public Education, Paul Hill and Ashley Jochim. “Paul Hill’s deep knowledge and thorough account of successful reform efforts always makes for a great read.”
• AEFP Journal
• All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr
• Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• The Art of Coaching, Elena Aguilar
• Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
• BOLD: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler
• Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
• Disrupting Class, Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn and Curtis Johnson
• Expecting Better, Emily Oster. “An interesting book on pregnancy written by a University of Chicago economist.”
• Exponential Organizations, Salim Ismail
• Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem, Simon Singh. “It’s a real page turner (no, really!) with some incredibly oddball protagonists.”
• Foundations for Young Adult Success, Nagoaka et al.
• A Song of Ice and Fire [Game of Thrones] book series, George R.R. Martin
• Influencer, Joseph Grenny
• Make Me!, Eric Toshalis
• The Martian, Andy Weir
• The Moor’s Account, Laila Lalami
• One More Thing, B.J. Novak
• The ONE Thing, Gary Keller
• The Power of Vulnerability, Brené Brown
• Pure Genius, Don Wettrick
• Student-Centered Learning: Nine Classrooms in Action, Bill Nave
• Teach Like a Pirate, Dave Burgess
• The Together Teacher, Maia Heyck-Merlin. “We have to do a better job helping our staff stay organized in our evolving model.”
• The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, Fritjof Capra
• The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal. “Motivation is everything for our students.”
• The Wright Brothers, David McCullough
• James K.A. Smith, “A philosopher who talks about how most of our learning happens at a pre-cognitive level: most of the habits, routines and disciplines we do on a daily basis are not a function of rational decisions we intellectually make, but rather emotional decisions that happen almost without our knowledge but nonetheless shape our imagination because we are first and foremost creatures of desire.”
• Back issues of Backpacker, Afar, the New Yorker.

More Recommendations

10 Summer Reading Books that Are Great for Personalized Learning Leaders and Teachers. This list from EdElements starts with their Personalized Learning Playbook and it includes our very own BlendMyLearning.

Crowdsourcing a Personal Learning Network blog series. The first post offered websites and social media recommendations. The second suggested leaders in the field to follow and learn from.

Thank you to these resourceful next gen leaders for their contributions:
Elina Alayeva, Director of National Strategy, Springpoint
Sujata Bhatt, Founder, Incubator Schools
Sajan George, Founder and CEO, Matchbook Learning
Nichole Husa, Personalized Learning Officer, Cornerstone Charter Schools
Steve Kossakoski, CEO, Virtual Learning Academy Charter School
Leigh McGuigan, CEO and Co-Founder, Vertus Charter Schools
Scott Milam, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Afton Partners
Jonathan Santos Silva, Head of School, Blackstone Valley Prep Mayoral Academy High School
Carrie Stewart, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Afton Partners
Ephraim Weisstein, Founder, Schools for the Future
Rebecca Wolfe, Director, Students at the Center, Jobs for the Future