When Calling Parents Isn’t Your Calling: A Teacher’s Guide to Communicating with Parents by Crystal Frommert
Teacher education programs do a great job of preparing educators for the exciting and engaging encounters with students in the classroom on a daily basis. However, many new teachers feel unprepared to handle conversations with families about their students. This book is a playbook for handling such critical communications with grace and efficiency. Frommert provides a wide array of methods for communicating and tips and strategies for doing so effectively. The tips related to reaching unresponsive parents and the ideas for embracing technology to assist in communication are particularly helpful. Surely, every educator will find something in this guide that works for them.—Emma Chiappetta, Curriculum Coordinator and Mathematics Instructor, Wasatch Academy (UT)
Leopoldstadt by Tom Stoppard
I have been a fan of Tom Stoppard since graduate school and have delighted in his intellectual wit and moral commitment since his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), his TV drama Jumpers (1972), and his movie Shakespeare in Love (1998). In fact, I have seen or read works of his from every decade for the past seven. His ingenuity in connecting ordinary people and characters from history or literature with serious moral and intellectual dilemmas appeals to every part of my mind. In Travesties (1974), for example, he gathers James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, the Dada artist Tristan Tzara, a librarian named Emily, and the aging British civil servant Henry Carr for a playful series of arguments on art and its importance, simply because they all lived in Zurich during World War I. The climactic lines of the play are Carr: “What did you do in the Great War, Mr. Joyce? Joyce: I wrote Ulysses. What did you do?”But this July I saw a new side of Stoppard: the personal story of his family’s tragedy during Germany’s years of antisemitism and occupation. Stoppard was born Tomás Sträussler in Czechoslovakia and later fled, moving to England after three years in exile in an Anglo-Indian boarding school. His newest play, Leopoldstadt, which this June won the Best Play Tony (his record-breaking fifth, in his 86th year), covers the years 1899 to 1955 as a large prosperous, and intermarried Jewish Viennese family moves abruptly from success to destruction, leaving a bare fragment of the family to attend a seder and recount the dooms of more than half their members during the war and Holocaust years, as well as reflect on their own complex relationships to Jewishness and other nationalities.
—Richard Barbieri, longtime Independent School contributor who spent 40 years as a teacher and administrator in independent schools
Culturally Responsive Conversations: Connecting with Your Diverse School Community by Marina Lee and Seth Leighton
There’s a growing understanding among educational practitioners about the responsibility to be culturally sensitive and provide opportunities for cross-cultural interactions. But even the most enthusiastic and seasoned teachers are often unprepared to do this effectively. This book has helped me become a much more confident cross-cultural communicator in our school community. It offers a rationale and toolkit for educators seeking to connect with and be more responsive to a diverse student body. The authors approach culture as nuanced, dynamic, and multidimensional, avoiding a reductionist view of it as a monolithic structure with fixed norms: “Culture is more than a list of food preferences, holidays, or the language people speak,” but rather a “framework around which one’s identity is built.” An intersectional lens helps discuss nuances of gender norms, socioeconomic background, and neurodiversity. Thoughtful and robust activities offer readers self-reflexivity as well as activities to do with students, parents, and colleagues. I strongly recommend this book for all teachers hoping to practice inclusivity to diverse student populations.
—Graeme Peel, English Teacher, Chapel Hill–Chauncey Hall (MA)
Learning to Depolarize: Helping Students and Teachers Reach Across Lines of Disagreement by Kent Lenci
In Learning to Depolarize, Lenci offers all of us—educators and parents and guardians—a research-based approach to engaging the “other”—those whose beliefs differ from our own. The education landscape has become the epicenter for the polarizing culture wars, and Lenci offers practical suggestions that stem from his own experiences in the classroom. Classroom-specific suggestions involved teaching students how to listen with receptiveness, using small-group dialogue to practice bridge-building, and developing assessment tools to foster greater self-awareness. I also valued Lenci’s commentary on how psychological principles, such as social perspective taking and managing media and emotions, can play a role in depolarizing our communities. This book is insightful, well-researched, straightforward, courageous, and inspirational. In short, this book is a must read! —Bonnie J. Ricci, Executive Director, International Council Advancing Independent School Accreditation
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