WELL Book Club
WOMEN EDUCATORS LEADING LEARNING
Women Sharing Ideas in a Supportive Academic Community
Learning To Lead
WELL - Women Educators Leading Learning believes that sharing ideas through challenging interactions based on reading common academic material, allows us to connect and advance the conversation around best practices for women administrators in leadership roles.
Our WELL BOOK CLUB presents new books and material for discussion and we organize and form regional Book Club discussions and BOOK TALK Special Events throughout the year. Meantime, browse our BOOK LIST of suggested reading.
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WELL Book Club BOOK LIST
BOOK #1
“Teaching on Days After: Educating for Equity in the Wake of Injustice”
By Alyssa Hadley Dunn
What should teachers do on the days after major events, tragedies, and traumas, especially when injustice is involved? This beautifully written book features teacher narratives and youth-authored student spotlights that reveal what classrooms do and can look like in the wake of these critical moments. Dunn incisively argues for the importance of equitable commitments, humanizing dialogue, sociopolitical awareness, and a rejection of so-called pedagogical neutrality across all grade levels and content areas. By highlighting the voices of teachers who are pushing beyond their concerns and fears about teaching for equity and justice, readers see how these educators address negative reactions from parents and administrators, welcome all student viewpoints, and negotiate their own feelings. These inspiring stories come from diverse areas such as urban New York, rural Georgia, and suburban Michigan, from both public and private schools, and from classrooms with both novice and veteran teachers. Teaching on Days After can be used to support current classroom teachers and to better structure teacher education to help preservice teachers think ahead to their future classrooms.
ORDER HERE >>
SPECIAL EVENT (POSTPONED - DATE T.B.D.):
BOOK TALK with
ALYSSA HADLEY DUNN!
BOOK #2
“The Education Wars”
By Jennifer C. Berkshire
and Jack Schneider
The culture war has engulfed our schools. Extremist groups are seeking to ban books, limit what educators can teach, and threatening the very foundations of public education. What’s behind these efforts? Why are our schools so vulnerable all of a sudden? And how can the millions of Americans who love their public schools begin to fight back?
In this concise, hard-hitting guide, journalist Jennifer Berkshire and education scholar Jack Schneider answer these questions and chart a way forward.
Surviving the Education Wars explains the sudden obsession with race and gender in schools, as well as the ascendancy of book banning efforts. It offers a clear analysis of school vouchers and the impact they’ll have on school finances. It deciphers the movement for “parents’ rights,” explaining the rights that students and taxpayers also have. And it reveals how the ostensible pursuit of “religious freedom” opens the door to discrimination against vulnerable children.
Berkshire and Schneider outline the core issues driving the education wars, offering essential information about issues, actors, and potential outcomes. In so doing, they lay out what is at stake for parents, teachers, and students and provide a roadmap for ensuring that public education survives this present assault.
ORDER HERE >>
SPECIAL EVENT JANUARY 23rd, 2025:
BOOK TALK with
JENNIFER C. BERKSHIRE!
BOOK #3
“EDUCATION LEAD(HER)SHIP
Advancing Women
in K–12 Administration”
By Jennie Weiner and Monica C. Higgins
This book exposes the systemic obstacles that impede the professional advancement of women and women of color in K–12 education and offers tools to recognize and combat these inequities. We investigate patterns of gender bias and gendered racism in the profession, prompted by the observation that, although the great majority of classroom educators are women, disproportionately few women inhabit leadership positions such as principal, superintendent, or school administrator. Using real women’s stories to illustrate how discrimination occurs in situ, we take aim at the widespread gender and racial discrimination in school systems, we identify paths to empowerment for women in education (and elsewhere). We advocate solidarity, collective action, and leveraging networks of allies to push for the re-engineering of our educational organizations, environments, and cultures to sow a more balanced and equitable leadership landscape.
ORDER HERE >>
