IFL Recommends November 2023

Hey everyone! We’re back for the 2023-2024 school year. This year we are kicking off with a cluster of IFL Recommends and in two weeks we will publish our first new article of the year.

This month’s recommendations include a “creepy” short story, a crime novel, and an article about an elementary school classroom. We hope you love them!

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IFL Recommends 6/20/23

If you are a visual thinker who enjoys data-driven insights, check out the chartr newsletter. Published several times a week, these five-minute reads look into data in business, tech, entertainment, and society.

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IFL Recommends 5/30/23

This week’s IFL Recommends comes from Laurie Speranzo, a math fellow at the IFL who lives in Boston and was recently singing the praises of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning, the second-tallest educational building in the world.

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IFL Recommends 5/9/23

This week’s recommendation is a Radiolab podcast about the history of the Golden Goose Awards as well as some award winners. These awards are the “Grammys” of government-funded research which recognize seemingly obscure scientific research that led to major breakthroughs and resulted in substantial societal impact.

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IFL Recommends 5/2/23

This week’s recommendation is about Muppets: Mayhem, the Disney+ upcoming faux musical documentary series, which follows the Electric Mayhem, the band from The Muppet Show, as they attempt to make their first album.

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IFL Recommends 4/25/23

This week’s recommendation is an article about speed booking, a quick-paced, interactive activity to get students to share books they are reading while helping them to practice their summarizing skills.

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IFL Recommends 4/18/23

This week’s recommendation is an article about Black Girls S.O.A.R. (Scholarship, Organizing, Arts, and Resistance). This program uses art and education and allows Black girls and TGNC (transgender, non-conforming) young people to become researchers in order to learn about the important stories that don’t end up in textbooks.

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IFL Recommends for 4/11/23  

Ahead of the Boston Marathon on April 17, this week’s recommendation is a series of articles about the upcoming race, including a couple of inspirational stories about a few runners and some numerical ways to analyze the race.

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IFL Recommends 3/28/23

This week’s recommendation is a podcast from Making Math Moments, during which Dr. Peg Smith, coauthor of 5 Practices for Orchestrating Productive Mathematical Discussions, is interviewed.

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IFL Recommends 3/14/23

This week’s recommendation is an article about the odds, illustrated with some visual representations and a multitude of statistics, of filling out a perfect bracket for the NCAA’s March Madness. Spoiler alert–the odds are not good.

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IFL Recommends 3/7/23

This week’s recommendation is a video about the history of calculating pi. There is also a link to last year’s Pi Day, which contains another video and some classroom activities.

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IFL Recommends 2/14/23

This week’s recommendation is an Edutopia article about looking beyond narrow metrics of more of what it means to be “good” at math and providing opportunities for students to see their potential.

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IFL Recommends 1/31/23

This week’s recommendation is an NPR article about a University of Pennsylvania professor incorporating ChatGPT, a chatbot that can answer questions, write articles, and summarize information, into his entrepreneurship and innovation classes.

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IFL Recommends 1/24/23

This week’s recommendation is a digital archive that the Heinz History Center created documenting the October 2018 Tree of Life attack on three Jewish congregations in Pittsburgh as well as its aftermath.

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IFL Recommends 1/17/23

This week’s recommendation is a blog post by literacy expert Timothy Shanahan in which he discusses the best ways to teach how to use context in reading. Shanahan also talks about issues with some current ways of teaching how to use context.

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IFL Recommends 1/3/23

This week’s recommendation is an article about a teacher from Brooklyn who started a wrestling club to help connect with students of color as well as help them form connections with each other.

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IFL Recommends 12/20/22

This week’s recommendation is a novel written by former inmate Michael A. DiVicino, which chronicles the lives of inmates via letters they’ve written sharing their pain, anger and regret. His hope is to turn lives around.

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IFL Recommends 12/13/22

This week’s recommendation is an NPR segment in which Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and professor, talks about the importance of rethinking your views. Included are links to some additional resources, including Grant’s website and some books he authored.

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IFL Recommends 12/6/22

This week’s recommendation is A list of books that some members of the IFL team have recommended. From memoirs to read-aloud books, you are bound to find something to read or gift this holiday season.

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IFL Recommends 11/29/22

This week’s recommendation is an article about the role and benefits of visual design in learning design and includes some collaboration tips for learning and visual designers.

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IFL Recommends 11/1/22

This week’s recommendation is an article about the Just Discipline Project, a project that seeks to eliminate traditional disciplinary practices that have created inequity in schools.

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IFL Recommends 10/04/22

This week’s recommendation is an excerpt from Michelle Pledger’s book LIBERATE! Pocket-Sized Paradigms for Liberatory Learning, a pocket-sized guide of practical resources to support efforts in cultivating a decolonized, and subsequently liberated classroom.

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IFL Recommends 9/6/22

Hey everyone, IFL Recommends is back for the 2022-2023 school year! Our first recommendation is actually three short articles centered around student identify and the importance of students feeling respected and seeing themselves in their learning.

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IFL Recommends 6/28

This week’s recommendation is an article around the complexity of reading and the challenges educators face teaching literacy.

This will be our final IFL Recommends for the school year. Have a great summer. See you in September!

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IFL Recommends 6/14

This week’s recommendation is an interactive game that allows players—youth and adults—the chance to experience the roles of the three branches of government.

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IFL Recommends 5/24

Laurie says, “I have been working on learning a new language (in baby steps). Because of the work that some of our district partners are doing with emergent multilingual students, I decided that I needed to venture into a language that I never studied to feel the struggle that many of our students face daily.”

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IFL Recommends 5/3

This week’s recommendation is about the Equal Rights Amendment, which the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives passed 50 years ago yet has still inexplicably not been added to the constitution.

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IFL Recommends 4/26

This week’s recommendation is about the educator expense federal tax deduction, unchanged for nearly two decades, and how it often does not reflect teachers’ actual expenses.

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IFL Recommends 4/19

This week’s recommendation is a podcast from Radiolab about how perceptions and opportunities early in life can affect future performance, sometimes unintentionally and unfortunately in a negative way.

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IFL Recommends 4/12

This week’s recommendation is a High Tech High (HTH) Unboxed podcast during which HTH’s Stacey Caillier talks to educator and author Dr. Brandi Hinnant-Crawford about how improvement science can be a tool for collective liberation and what we do before that liberation comes about.

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IFL Recommends 3/29

This week’s recommendation looks at UC Berkeley’s Edible Book Festival—one of a number of Edible Book Festivals around the world held on or near April Fools’ Day—where entrants have fun with literature and food.

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IFL Recommends 3/22

This week’s recommendation is about We Are Owed., Ariana Brown’s debut poetry collection exploring Black relationality in Mexican and Mexican American spaces (released in July 2021).

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IFL Recommends 3/8

This week’s recommendation is a video that provides a history of pi. This is the second part of our two-part series on the history of mathematics. We have also included a list of Pi Day activities curated by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM).

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IFL Recommends 2/22

This week’s recommendation is about how student talk moves, via the implementation of high-quality instructional materials in STEM, can provide equitable learning experiences and improve academic outcomes.

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IFL Recommends 1/25

This week’s recommendation is an excerpt from Christopher Emdin’s book Ratchetdemic: Reimagining Academic Success, an educational model that can empower students to embrace themselves, their backgrounds, and their education without sacrificing their identities.

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IFL Recommends 1/18

In this week’s recommendation, a math teacher shares his experiences as a member of an integrated science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teaching team, and how transformative professional development has helped him and his students.

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IFL Recommends 1/11

This week’s recommendation is segment from Dr. Virginia Loh-Hagan’s model minority myth workshop, “Beyond the Moment: Sustaining a Movement to Amplify APIDA Communities,” from the IFL’s 2021 forum Centering Student & Teacher Voice in the Equity Agenda.

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IFL Recommends 12/14

This week’s recommendation is an article about Pittsburgh-area (Wilkinsburg) author Deesha Philyaw, who was honored in the spring of 2021 for her collection of short stories, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.”

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IFL Recommends 12/7

This week’s recommendation is a National Book Award Finalist, Printz Honor Book, and Walter Honor Book about a group of young, second-generation Japanese American citizens (Nisei) who grew up in Japantown, San Francisco, during World War II and the time of mass U.S. incarcerations of people of Japanese descent.

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IFL Recommends 11/30

This week’s recommendations include books for readers of all ages that welcome, celebrate, and honor diversity in its many forms. Check out the titles and think about which to add to your library!

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IFL Recommends 11/23

This week’s recommendation, the second in series about critical race theory (CRT), more closely examines the approach to studying U.S. policies and institutions and answers foundational questions that underlie CRT and the law.

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IFL Recommends 11/16

This week and next we look at an academic concept that has recently taken center stage in the academic world. We begin by presenting an article that provides a brief overview of critical race theory and why it has taken center stage. Next week’s article examines the concept more closely and answers foundational questions that underlie critical race theory and the law.

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IFL Recommends 11/9

This week’s recommendation explains why infographics are effective in educational contexts, how they can be used in classrooms, and how they can be designed for education.

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IFL Recommends 11/2

This week’s recommendation is a joint statement from NCSM: Leadership in Mathematics in Education and TODOS: Mathematics for ALL around positioning multilingual learners to be successful in mathematics education.

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IFL Recommends 10/12

This week’s recommendation details a Jamaican-born man’s experiences, with beautiful and sometimes disturbing imagery, of walking along streets in Jamaica and in the United States, and how different those walks are.

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IFL Recommends 10/5

This week’s recommendation is an article about racism and colorblindness and why racism is not just about “the most clear-cut, isolated, acts of extreme prejudice.”

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IFL Recommends 9/28

This week’s recommendation is a short TED Talk (presented by one of the youngest-ever TED speakers) that looks at ways that parents and caregivers can support children’s healthy brain development.

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IFL Recommends 9/21

This week’s read looks at the history of the Carlisle Indian School, the first off-reservation Native American boarding school in the United States. The author looks at the negative impact it, and other boarding schools like it, has had on Native American children and their families.

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IFL Recommends 9/7

This week’s read looks into the (re)opening of Broadway. Math fellow Beatriz Strawhun chose this article because “The theater has always been my escape, my chance to take an adventure, or walk in another’s shoes during some distant time period or in a far-off place. I am so excited for the reopening of the Great White Way. But I am more excited for those programs that take students to a Broadway Show to begin once again. It is through the theater that I find my way, my song and my story and given the chance, students do as well. Let’s all go to the theater!”

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