In Clap When You Land, Elizabeth Acevedo captures a story of two sisters, Camino and Yahaira, brought together by the loss of their father in a plane crash two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks. The sisters, similar to our students, are needing to find themselves during historical events and tragedy. The impact of the plane crash and subsequent journey of the sisters, shared in lyrical and poetic verse stanzas, is simple, intimate, raw, and deep. Currently, our students are needing to navigate a pandemic where grief, in all its non-linear glory, runs parallel to the expectations and requirements of returning to school. Camino and Yahaira were able to pause and take time for their journey. At our schools, that would be a luxury that we are often unable to provide for our students. What is our ethical responsibility? What happens to a young person's mind when confronted with mortality, instability, and the world shutting down like it did? When thinking of students sitting in the classrooms this fall, instructors and faculty at schools are working without full knowledge of the underlying storylines, narratives, and experiences that have shaped them. This book shows the importance of giving adolescents the time, space, and support they need to process their grief. The Dominican tradition of clapping when your flight lands is used to express blessings and gratitude for having arrived safely. Our students are unable to metaphorically clap as they are still on this pandemic journey. We are challenged to find the time and space to signal the runway ahead. 

In this provocative work, Khyati Y. Joshi takes an intersectional approach to three related phenomena in the US: Christian privilege, Christian normativity, and Christian hegemony. Along the way, she shows that Christianity in the United States has historically been entwined with notions of Whiteness, and argues convincingly that the constitutional guarantees about religious freedom have been, in practice, mechanisms to reinforce particular Christianity-based understandings of religious faith and practice. Much of the book is an informed tour of American history, after which Joshi offers concrete suggestions on how to better see, understand, and even interrupt White Christian Privilege in our communities. In an era when many see a hostility between American Christianity and social justice and diversity programs, this book insists on a reasoned, thoughtful, and integrative approach that straddles the lines between ethnic studies and religious studies. Whether we agree fully with Joshi or not, this book will be a fruitful starting point and conversation starter for any school community that values – or claims to value – religious diversity.

In Lydia Millet's dystopian A Children's Bible, a group of loosely connected children face life in a world of cataclysmic storms and without the wisdom of adults. The adults, so to speak, have left the building, too distressed and concerned with themselves to teach their children well, or at all. The children in Millet's novel have no choice but to brave the elements on their own, innovating to survive. When it comes to the future of climate change, will reality be stranger than this fiction? In his recent Education Week opinion piece, Adam Brumer draws our attention to human-caused climate change as an urgent topic of study in K-12 schools. A California native who taught in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, Brumer has first-hand knowledge of the impact of physical and environmental disruption – both on himself as a student and on his own students. Brumer appeals to educators to rally behind "climate change as an education priority" and to raise its importance at both the school and policy levels. He notes the salience of the moment as the Biden Administration seeks to bring about greater environmental justice by allocating resources to support communities disproportionately impacted by climate changes and disruptions. "Connections between climate change and learning outcomes are well documented," Brumer asserts, noting the relationship between how children live their daily lives and whether they arrive to school ready to learn. In the end, though, Brumer argues that "climate crisis affects all children" and is an adult-created problem that educators are well-positioned to help solve.

Recently, social justice has been at the forefront when reframing curriculum in schools. How can educators intentionally use more inclusive practices in their everyday classrooms? In their study, Laura Moorhead and Jeremy Jimenez examine data from a high school in Northern California that began integrating into their social studies curriculum experiences of the LGBTQ+ community and an awareness of intersectionality. This portrait provides a potential model for other schools and shares practical identity awareness strategies. Through reflection and teacher/student interviews, the authors highlight the responsibility of educators to deepen student understanding of diversity and to help students critically examine ways of thinking. Interestingly, the authors push forward the creation of "spaces of becoming" where students can learn and open up about the complexities of their own intersecting identities and encounter productive challenges to their levels of comfort. A different form of identity mapping outlined in the article, with questions and coding, allows educators to map and better understand the context of their students. Teachers affirm that such intentionality transforms current thinking about identities beyond our own. Further, it allows students to be more critical of power dynamics and people's own privilege and identity when studying history.

If you missed this late summer article by Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge and you work in a school where teenagers are permitted their cell phones throughout the day, it isn't too late to engage your faculty and/or families with the article's argument. Such engagement is particularly salient if you see any negative impact of smartphones on the learning environment, culture, and/or individual students at your school. Quoting Sherry Turkle, Haidt and Twenge say of all of us during the smartphones era, "We are forever elsewhere," a truth it is difficult to ignore, particularly when it comes to the research regarding adolescents. In English-speaking countries all over the world, there has been a huge increase in rates of adolescent loneliness directly correlated to the rise of smartphones. Haidt and Twenge review the published research and note, too, worse health outcomes with increased social media use, ultimately calling on educators to "give kids a long period each day when they are not distracted by their devices: the school day." (They have other recommendations, too, including "delay[ing] entry into social media.") In independent school education, we aspire to be responsive to our students and to the latest research, making adjustments to our practices throughout the year. Haidt and Twenge present their own version of this challenge: "Will students spontaneously put away their phones and switch back to old-fashioned in-person socializing, at least for the hours that they are together in school? We have a historic opportunity to help them do so."

In The Extended Mind, science writer Annie Murphy Paul summarizes considerable research that has been conducted by neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and psychologists. By doing so, she demonstrates that we think not only with our brains, but also with our bodies, our surroundings, and our relationships. Research in the early 2020s on mindsets, grit, memory, and other aspects of the science of learning focused on how to improve thinking with the brain. This newer research explores the next frontiers of learning: teaching children how to listen and learn from their bodies, optimize their environments, and take advantage of interactions with others. On the one hand, the book shows us how narrow our conception of thinking can be. The Extended Mind notes that our brains are quite limited in what they are able to consciously process; therefore, if we're able to harness our bodily perceptions and work more strategically with others we can significantly enhance our brain power. On the other hand, the book explains why certain strategies frequently used with students and colleagues are effective (e.g., taking a walk outside, studying/working in a group, or listening to our hunches). Paul's work delivers on the promise implicit in its title; this is a brain-extending book.

In season 6 of the Revisionist History podcast, Malcolm Gladwell teams up with students from Reed College to hack the algorithm used by US News and World Report each year to publish their rankings of the nation's colleges and universities. Their findings reveal in stark detail the underlying racism and class privilege that undergird these rankings, and the lengths leaders in higher education will go to ensure their place in the upper levels of the lists. Gladwell demonstrates indisputably that the actual experience of students and the excellence of their education can be completely irrelevant in terms of where each school falls on the list each year. Colleges, like Reed, that decline to participate in the rankings have faced pressure to stay in the game, and many historically black colleges cannot find their way into the rankings at all because this system of ranking disregards, completely, the things that HBUCs do so well—mentoring, recognizing the challenges of individual students, especially those from impoverished backgrounds, and the like. Gladwell takes a particularly close look at Dillard University. This school has an admirable mission, and by many standards should be on the radar of many students, yet it is completely unknown to those who rely so heavily on the US News and World Report lists. Again, Gladwell acts as an important gadfly in surfacing the ugly assumptions that are baked into our system of rating institutions of higher education, and he shows them to be more of a sham than a reliable guide.

As publicly funded programs designed exclusively for gifted and talented students continue to draw both vocal critics and passionate supporters, there is opportunity for independent schools to evaluate their own practices and to redefine what it means to meet the needs of the gifted learner. Bringing heightened challenge to those with exceptional academic capacity can, often justifiably, attract the charge of elitism and racism based on evidence of inequities in both the access and outcomes of classes for high achievers. Dona Matthews takes on the myths and points of contention in gifted education including dependence on IQ scores and the creation of a "gifted/not-gifted" divide that is socially divisive and frequently unjust. Matthews calls for transformative change and proposes, in useful, practical terms, a shift in mindset that calls for meeting all exceptional needs more broadly across the population. She uses recent advances in the science of brain development to point us away from a forever, all-in view of giftedness. Her "optimal match" definition of giftedness shifts the focus from scores to seeing giftedness as a subject-specific ability at a particular point in time, requiring adaptations to the curriculum. Matthews highlights the benefits of reducing labelling, broadening access, and increasing the potential for effective enriched education for any who need it. Creating optimal learning environments requires trusting capable educators to identify talents within their contexts, enrich meaningfully, and support parents in fully understanding their child's needs and skills. To see giftedness differently opens the potential for gifted education to take its place as a dynamic, flexible, inclusive, and responsive resource in every classroom. 

Is design thinking an activity, a process, a mindset, or a toolkit? Sarah Stein Greenberg, executive director of Stanford's d.School, would say all of the above. Her new book, Creative Acts for Curious People, is an excellent resource for first-time and experienced design-thinkers alike. In it, Greenberg compiles a trove of design thinking exercises sourced from her innovative faculty. By design, the book is as pleasant to look at as it is simple to use. Over 80 "assignments" are arranged into helpful sub-categories such as, "See Things In A New Way," "Work Well With Others," "Work Toward Equity," and "Have Fun" – all worthy pursuits in our schools. The numbered assignments in Creative Acts, like design thinking itself, can be used iteratively and in a non-linear approach. Leaders will value "Cultivate Your Inner Ethicist" (#62). Amongst faculty, they will learn "How to Give Feedback" (#57). They will innovate via "I Like, I Wish" (#60), or obsess over "The Banana Challenge (#45)". Finally, they will forge relationships and build trust by asking "What's In Your Fridge?" (#16). If, among other things, design thinking is a toolkit, this collection apprentices our ability to rethink and repair our schools at a crucial time for maintenance.