Changing Professional Development One Question At A Time
Research Based Professional Development for Administrators and Teachers since 2019
Book Distillations
At Socrates - Head of School we know you don’t have time to read all of the books applicable to education so we’ve read them for you. Distillations contain the key points that we think educators and school leaders will find relevant from each book. We hope that these distillations will help you find information quickly allowing you to make informed decisions about which book(s) will be valuable to your practice.
Our book distillations are divided into two main categories:
Books about Leading are relevant to school administrators or teacher leaders.
Books about Learning are more helpful for educators still in the classroom.
Click here to learn more about our distillation process.
Some of our most popular distillations
In What If I Say The Wrong Thing, Verna Myers helps individuals and leaders understand the structures, policies, and cultures that organizations may have in place that hinder achieving equity, diversity, and inclusion. With examples from her personal life and professional career Myers provides readers with useful suggestions for how one can become a more culturally responsible individual and how leaders can transform organizations.
Natalie Wexler argues that taking a more rigorous approach to reading and writing starts with focusing on content rather than skills taught in a vacuum. For students to understand complex texts, they must first understand the complexities of the world around them. Wexler bemoans the high-stakes testing that focuses mostly on reading and math leave limited time during the school day for students to learn about social studies, science, and advanced writing composition.
Talking to Strangers is different from talking to our friends and acquaintances. Using contemporary case studies, Gladwell challenges his readers to see where experts have made mistakes in communicating with strangers and how we can use those lessons to approach strangers with more humility, compassion, and kindness.
How to Raise an Adult, by Julie Lythcott-Haims, is in many ways a meta-analysis of the dozens of books she references and curated over the course of her 14 years as a Dean of Freshman at Stanford University. A great read for any parent or parent-to-be who wants to reflect on how they were raised and improve on that standard for the next generation.
In Permission to Feel, we learn that some of the most important aspects of learning - attention, focus, and memory - are all controlled by our emotions, not by cognition. Marc Brackett helps us understand what emotions are, how to label them, and the information emotions communicate, potentially transforming how administrators and teachers lead and how students learn.
Jessica Lahey gives every parent in the world reason to calm down and disengage from helicopter or snowplow parenting. In what could be a sister book to The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, The Gift of Failure reassures us that the real lessons in life are the ones that are personal, determined by our own decisions, and force us to look in the mirror and take aim at who we are and want to be.
Dare to Lead reads as though you are sitting down with Brene Brown for a gut check over a really strong cup of coffee (hold the artificial sweetener). Through her unapologetic tone, she lights a spark in that one corner of your heart, better yet, your soul that makes you sit straight up in your bed, grab your remote as though it’s a microphone, and say to yourself - “I can do this”.
Are you ready to overhaul everything you thought you knew about assessment? In On Your Mark, Thomas Guskey asks us to unpack the philosophy of why we give grades at all.
If you are a model thinking junkie, Quiet Leadership by David Rock will whet your whistle and then some, as it’s full of complex and interwoven models. If you prefer fewer diagrams and acronyms, Rock will still push your thinking to make sure your conversations are leading others to think for themselves.
Small Teaching Online by Flower Darby and James Lang looks at the small teaching methods that can be implemented in online classes to have a large impact. While largely focused on higher education, Small Teaching Online provides ideas and strategies for delivery content and enhancing learning in an online format. Constant changes in our world makes becoming familiar with online teaching practices an imperative for all educators and this book does the trick!