Biblio Reviews

If you've ever wondered why the guidance department seems to be less than helpful in counseling during the college access process, there's a reason. According to Mandy Savitz-Romer and Suzanne Bouffard in Ready, Willing, and Able: A Developmental Approach to College Access and Success  (2014), that reason is the following: "...[S]chool counselors, who typically hold master's degrees in counseling and licenses provided by state departments of education, rarely obtain training in college counseling...In fact, according to the National Association of College Admissions and Counseling, out of the more than four hundred counselor education programs in graduate schools, only about forty include a credit bearing course specific to college counseling, and even those courses are not necessarily required" (p. 35). While not the main argument of the book, I found this bit of information very interesting because it certainly helped me understand why, from personal experien...

One of my handful of memories from middle school and early years in the U.S. comes from seventh or eighth grade. It's hard to remember which year because we shared the same classrooms and teachers during those two years. In any case, we had a guest speaker, a relatively young (and white) one, and that's about all I remember about why he was there to speak to us. My strongest memory about this speaker, though, was a question he had asked: "Raise your hand if you plan on going to college?" I remember thinking, "Well, d'uh, we're all going to college. That's the goal of going to school. What a dumb question." Reflection upon this particular moment reveals a few things: Until that moment, I didn't consider that I would have a choice in the matter. In my household, that was the expectation. A relatively new immigrant to the U.S., I was an innocent. I wasn't aware of the hostile racial history of the United States and the bitter legacy ...

Despite sweeping reforms in U.S. education in the 20th and 21st centuries, much in U.S. education has remained essentially the same. In  Transforming School Culture: How to Overcome Staff Division  (2009),   Dr. Anthony Muhammad explains that the fixed state of education in the U.S. is the result of reforms that focus on technical changes (structure, policies, teaching tools) rather than on cultural changes (mindsets and behaviors). Unless a school begins to focus on making cultural changes, no amount of technical changes will ever result in a healthy, productive, and successful school culture. This, he asserts, is because schools comprise of four key groups who each have their own agendas. A school leader who doesn't learn how to manage and fulfill the needs of these four distinct groups is susceptible to developing or maintaining a toxic and dysfunctional school culture, "the set of norms, values and beliefs, rituals and ceremonies, symbols and stories that make up the ...

In September, I will enter my third year of teaching 8th grade English after having taught the previous seven years at a high school in another district. Many factors contributed to the change in my work zip code, one of which was my desire to restart by working with an age group that still believed in possibilities and who would benefit the most from instruction to build their literacy. The biggest factor, however, was a need to leave what had become a hopeless situation. In my last few years at the high school level, I taught seniors who began to suffer from  senioritis  as early as October. While their lack of motivation was dispiriting, their lack of literacy and critical thinking skills as they neared the beginning of their independent adult lives was devastating. Being 17-19 year-olds, many had already solidified their beliefs about school, believed they had learned all they could be taught, and saw themselves as being too grown to be told what to do and how to do it. ...

Who knew that Matthew McConaughey's foray into romantic comedy--a most dreadful film genre to most critics--would be so sociologically and culturallly relevant? In Dr. Leonard Sax's Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men (2009), he argues that McConaughey's Failure to Launch (2006) is a gem of a movie in that it reflects an American epidemic of men who are underachieving and who seem to be perfectly accepting of that fact. Before presenting his explanation, I offer a personal anecdote. This past school year, I experienced my most challenging teaching experience EVER. This is because I came across the most disengaged, apathetic, and academically unmotivated group of students EVER (the word bears repeating). Made up of a majority of boys, this group was so immature and indifferent to academic learning that school was simply a social experience. Of all the things that they were engaged in, academics ranke...

Technically, the Common Core is already here, but in case one did not know, the saturation of "Common Core aligned" notices on various workbooks, vocabulary texts, and the deluge of Common Core-themed texts on the market would make that announcement clear enough. Anxious parents, and even more anxious and novice teachers, will soon scan these shelves to buy these Common Core-themed texts in the desperate hope that they will be enlightened. Nancy Frey and Douglas Fisher's  Rigorous Reading: 5 Access Points for Comprehending Complex Texts  (2014) is one such text they might come across. In the end, Frey and Fisher's  Rigorous Reading  is an overview of the reading demands of the Common Core. In it, Frey and Fisher identify five strategies ("access points") for engaging students with complex texts, a requirement of the new Common Core. These five access points include the following: Purpose and Modeling Close and Scaffolded Reading Instruction Collaborati...