In Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations: Elevating Home Experiences and Classroom Practices for Collective Care, Nawal Qarooni invites us to step beyond school-centric, one-off events and practices to create more authentic, engaging collaborations with caregivers. Instead of asking what families can do to support schools, Qarooni asks how schools can identify and celebrate what families already inherently bring to their children’s literacy learning.
 
Establishing this work in holistic teaching—a pedagogical mindset that affirms the importance of loving the whole child through compassionate, collective care—Qarooni explores five critical literacy tenets by highlighting opportunities to listen for, honor, connect to, and elevate family strengths while inviting them even further into our shared work and encouraging reflection around: 

• Recognizing the journey of process,
• Celebrating the role collaboration plays within the collective
• Using observational literacy to read the world
• Advocating for the power of talk to grow ideas and connect with others
• Giving children choice to make self-directed decisions

With moments of memoir woven in alongside diverse family examples and classroom stories connected to realistic instructional practices, Qarooni shows how all families contribute meaningfully to their children’s literacy lives. Discover how we can tap into those vast wells to support learning at home and in school while building positive, reciprocal relationships across both settings.
 
With an afterword by En Comunidad authors, Carla España and Luz Yadira Herrera, Nourishing Caregiver Collaborations is rooted in the simple truth that we cannot separate knowing our students from knowing their home, communities, and the people that they love. This book offers a toolkit for connecting with families and elevating the intrinsic strengths that reside in every child’s home.

With a focus on fostering a deep love for reading and prioritizing student growth, A Year for the Books: Routines and Mindsets for Creating Student-Centered Reading Communities is a must-have for educators from kindergarten through middle school. Discover a teacher-friendly resource crafted by Katie Walther, esteemed educator, and respected veteran teacher Maria Walther that will take you behind the scenes and through the school year as they share simple, practical strategies to design learner-centered literacy experiences.
 
Starting with the first few weeks of school, each chapter highlights multiple ways to embed literacy experiences across the entire year that prioritize learners and literacy. To support you in your decision making, the classroom-tested ideas in each chapter are arranged around five grounding principles:

• Actionable strategies for launching and sustaining a vibrant reading culture 
• Clear processes to define and communicate community beliefs
• Creative structures for establishing and maintaining reading routines
• Innovative ideas for cultivating an inclusive reading community 
• Equitable techniques for partnering with families and caregivers

Within each chapter you will also find nuggets of wisdom from the Walthers' collective years of teaching, practical ideas about how to keep it simple, and several book suggestions. As an added bonus, this book features companion podcasts or PDCasts where you can hear the authors tackle authentic classroom dilemmas and share their decision-making process.

Whether you’re a novice or seasoned educator, you’ll want A Year for the Books by your side as you advocate for your student readers and promote independent reading in your classroom all year long.
 

What should conversations about race look and sound like in the elementary classroom? How do we respond authentically and truthfully to children’s questions about the world? 
And how can we build classroom communities that encourage these meaningful conversations about race?

Matthew Kay and Jennifer Orr take on these questions and more in We’re Gonna Keep On Talking: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom. A companion work to Kay’s Not Light, But Fire, this book focuses on the unique and powerful role discussions about race can play in the elementary classroom.

Drawing its title inspiration from the lyrics of the freedom song “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” sung by hundreds of children marching against segregation in what came to be known as the Children’s Crusade of 1963, We’re Gonna Keep On Talking is written for teachers who are willing to match children’s courage and brilliance, and who believe that “a foundation in meaningful race discourse will help [children] to seek justice for themselves and their neighbors, to be kinder, [and] more thoughtful.”

Writing with the humility and honest storytelling of two career classroom teachers, Matthew Kay and Jennifer Orr share:

• Strategies for building safe and supportive classroom and school spaces for productive discourse
• Dozens of practical teacher moves for facilitating race conversations
• Classroom stories that allow readers to envision ways into the work through picture books, art, graphs, historical photographs, and current events
• Tips for aligning the work of race conversations to your grade-level standards

Whether you are unsure of where to begin or looking to deepen your practice, We’re Gonna Keep On Talking will be your guide to the important work of race conversations in the elementary classroom.
 

In 6 Tools for Collaborative Mathematics Coaching, Nicora Placa lays out a clear path to help you become a trusted and effective math coach. Her “6 Tools” are flexible structures that you and your colleagues can use to learn together:
 

1. Building Teams: Fostering a Learning Community
2. Student Interviews: Learning to Listen
3. Visiting Classrooms: Developing Your Lens
4. Learning Walks: Focusing the Team on Students’ Thinking
5. Rehearsing Routines: Practicing with Colleagues
6. Lesson Study: Learning Collectively with Voice, Choice, and Agency

In this easy-to-use, practical guide, Placa introduces each of the 6 Tools with classroom vignettes, step-by-step guidelines for rollout, connections to the literature, resources for further research, planning templates, and opportunities for you to adapt the tool for your particular context.

Whether you're a new coach who loves teaching math to children but is new to adult education, or a more experienced coach who is looking for new strategies to engage your teams, 6 Tools for Collaborative Mathematics Coaching can help you create learning opportunities that honor teachers as professionals. With a collaborative coaching approach, you can improve teaching and learning across your school and for all your students.

"There’s so much to love about how 6 Tools is constructed." --Elham Kazemi

In her comprehensive guide, Better Book Clubs: Deepening Comprehension and Elevating Conversation, literacy coach and staff developer Sara Kugler shows you how to combine the power of book clubs with assessment-driven instruction to support your students as they talk and think about texts together. Using authentic book club conversations as an assessment of academic talk and text understanding, Kugler raises the bar on typical professional discussions about book clubs, moving beyond teacher-directed interactions and surface-level conversations to include:

• Structures, teaching methods, and routines that support authenticity and independence in book clubs
• Suggestions for starting, scaffolding, and sustaining effective, student-centered book clubs
• Tips for listening in on clubs as a way to assess academic talk and text understanding
• Methods for moving from observation into instruction that improves conversation and comprehension
• Touchstone anchor charts and sample lessons for launching and maintaining strong clubs at a variety of independence levels

With a dual focus on stronger comprehension and improved conversations, Better Book Clubs will help you establish effective book clubs that will engage your readers, enhance your learning communities, and become an indispensable component of your literacy classroom.
 

All students enter our math classrooms with ideas worthy of discussion. Some of the most effective breakthroughs come from short, intentional conversations between students and teacher, yet planning for these moments can seem daunting. In her innovative book, Conferring in the Math Classroom: A Practical Guidebook to Using 5-Minute Conferences to Grow Confident Mathematicians, Gina Picha focuses on simple and transformative ways teachers can use math conferences, short conversations between teachers and small groups of students at work, to guide instruction, assess understanding, and build strong math thinkers. 

Inside you will learn to: 
 

• Facilitate math conferences to listen to students, identify and build on their strengths, and encourage them to share their math thinking
• Build a positive math identity that will help nurture student-centered math classrooms
• Ask exploratory questions to gain data-driven insight into their math reasoning and plan the next steps for instruction 
• Provide differentiated math instruction based on the individual or small group needs
• Drive fun and interactive math talk in the classroom

 
Picha includes teacher questioning guides, If-Then charts organized by grade level and math topic, and note-taking templates to help you get started with math conferring right away. This practical and highly accessible approach can help students deepen their math understanding, build confidence in their math abilities, and connect learnings between math subjects.