Rosita’s Reads June 8

This week’s read looks at a reform initiative in which students at a California high school used their voice, experiences, and insights in collaborating with educators on how to best reform schools.

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Rosita’s Reads June 1

People process grief in different ways and experiencing grief in a pandemic is even more complex. Read on to learn about one person’s experiences and thoughts on delayed grief and healing during and after the pandemic.

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Rosita’s Reads May 25

What do beets and infections have in common? This week’s read looks at a high school student’s science project that used beets and sutures threads to indicate an infection.

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Rosita’s Reads May 18

This week’s read looks at the toll the Covid-19 pandemic has taken on essential workers, particularly migrant farmworker in California, and includes a song by Lila Downs that honors and benefits those workers. Take a listen!

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Rosita’s Reads April 20

This week’s read looks at the weight the pandemic has placed on educators. The article highlights “community-wide” approaches and short-term solutions for dealing with issues that teachers and the families of their students are experiencing.

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Rosita’s Reads April 6

This week’s “read” is a video of a lecture from Dr. Tricia Rose, Chancellor’s professor of Africana studies and the director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Watch Dr. Rose delve into how structural racism works in the United States.

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Rosita’s Reads March 30

“As we grapple with the forces of white supremacy and anti-Blackness, we must also come to terms with the increase of over 1900% in hate crimes against Asian identifying folks in NYC this past year. We must be sensitive to the cultural factors that usually get lost in the conversation—that people from traditional Asian families sometimes hide emotions and suffer in silence. We need to make space to hear them.”
–Dr. David Kirkland
With the recent attack on Asian-Americans in Atlanta and the continued prevalence of Asian-American racism, this week provides two must reads on the issue.

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Rosita’s Reads March 23

This week’s recommendation examines sculptor Meta Warrick’s 1907 exhibition on the founding of Jamestown, which strived to counter demeaning stereotypes of African Americans by depicting their progress and success in the United States.

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Rosita’s Reads March 16

This week’s read is an article that explores different types of mistakes, how teachers and their students can learn and benefit when mistakes happen, and alternatives to becoming fixated on pandemic schooling missteps.

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Rosita’s Reads March 9

This week’s read is an article by C. Brandon Ogbunu that examines analogies for racism as a pathology. Read on to delve into an exploration of white nationalism and reflections on what solutions the author’s new analogy may offer.

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Rosita’s Reads March 2

This week’s read is an American Educator article by Nora S. Newcombe that examines spatial thinking. Check it out to read about techniques educators already use that develop spatial thinking and how building these techniques into curricula can lead to increased math and science learning.

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Rosita’s Reads February 23

The week’s read is an article by Kelly Niccolls and Rebecca Midles that examines the distinctions between viewing the pandemic as a time of schooling and peer interaction loss instead of a time of learning loss. While the challenges of COVID have been great, looking forward, the authors offer some possible next-steps for renewing learning communities and learning outcomes with families and community partners, using the pandemic as an opportunity and not a setback.

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Rosita’s Reads February 16

The week’s reads provide two different lessons for students to learn about (or more about) National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman and her 2021 presidential inauguration poem “The Hill We Climb.” In Ms. Gorman’s powerful words:

“We are striving to forge a union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us.”

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Rosita’s Reads February 9

The recommendation this week is about the strengths of children with dyslexia and comes from a recent collaborative study by UC San Francisco neuroscientists along with the UCSF Dyslexia Center and UCSF Memory and Aging Center.

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Rosita’s Reads February 2

There is a strong relationship between the success of bilingual and multilingual learners and the attitudes of educators and school systems toward bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism. This week’s recommendation challenges us to reflect on our practice and take on the language-as-the-problem orientation when it comes to bilingual and multilingual learners.

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Rosita’s Reads January 26

This week’s read is an article by Linda Darling Hammond that outlines 10 policy moves that can be made right now to begin addressing the significant inequities embedded in our education system. The challenges of COVID while further highlighting the stark inequities have also created conditions for positive and revolutionary change. Check it out and see how your school’s efforts align.

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Rosita’s Reads January 19

This week’s reads are a combination of article and book. In conjunction, they offer insight into racism and white privilege. The first, an article, highlights why racism should be declared a public health issue and how doing so forces systemic disparities to the surface. The second recommendation, a book, explores white privilege within and beyond the classroom and challenges readers to consider their roles and responsibilities in taken on racial injustice and inequity.

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Rosita’s Reads January 12

This week, Rosita’s Reads recommends an article about a New Zealand primary school. The project focused on using peer feedback and information and communication technologies to enhance the writing achievement of primary school boys.

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Rosita’s Reads January 5

This week’s Rosita’s Read comes from the field of cognitive science. It offers findings related to the development of critical thinking that are strong and clear enough to merit classroom application.

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Rosita’s Reads December 15

The Rosita’s Reads for this week explore student voice and agency. Across the two recommended texts, voice and agency are looked at in relationship to motivation and engagement, learner-centered classrooms, and formative assessment.

We hope you enjoy the recommendations from the last Rosita’s Reads of 2020. Stay tuned; we will be back on January 5, 2021.

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Rosita’s Reads December 8

This week Rosita offers a few recommendations for children’s books that are great for readers of all ages. The recommendations celebrate culture, identity, and standing up for what is right. Stories are important because they have the ability to open eyes to ideas and perspectives, to shift minds and hearts, and to establish a new normal.

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Rosita’s Reads November 24

This week’s recommendation, much like last week’s, encourages you to look at the link between the learning that occurs with families and communities and the learning that occurs in schools. Now, maybe even more than any other time, educators and educational organizations need to understand, honor, and build upon the learning that happens in the homes and communities of students from diverse cultures.

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Rosita’s Reads November 17

This week’s recommendation centers on the idea that common sense outweighs school learning for getting along in the world. Though the article comes from decades ago, the sentiment holds true today and reinforces the need to balance education by recognizing and honoring out-of-school learning with the learning that is being called for within schools.

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Rosita’s Reads November 10

This week’s recommendations focus on the lasting footprint that COVID 19 will leave on education. These articles celebrate the ingenuity of educators and educational organizations, the realities facing schools at the beginning of the pandemic, and now, the amazing challenge of learning from this globalized situation to be and do better for educators and students.

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Rosita’s Reads November 3

This week’s recommendations offer a break from what might typically come across your Twitter or Facebook newsfeed. One of the articles shares new research on the relationship between choice, choice-confirmation bias, and learning. The other article shares information about NASA’s new treaty for maintaining peace on the moon.

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Rosita’s Reads October 27

The recommendations from this week explore the idea of working together. One article offers suggestions for engaging youth in what could (and should) be collective work at the local and state level. The other shares insights about the link between understanding differences and the role of collaborative work with those who are thought to be “different” to achieve a goal.

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Rosita’s Reads October 13

The articles this week offer insights into the importance of different perspectives on creativity, the impact of retaking the SATs, and the ways in which COVID-19 has changed the work of those in child care centers.

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