So it’s summer and you dream of sitting outside, sipping on iced coffee and reading a good book. If you’re anything like me, you like to stay connected to your “teacher self” by reading some good teacher professional development books. I mean, you FINALLY have the time for it. The only trouble is: what do you read? Well, I’ve got you covered. Below, I recommend ten teacher professional development books that truly helped transform my teaching practice.

The First Six Weeks of School

This Responsive Classroom book is gold for both new teachers and seasoned teachers. I’ve taught for 7 years but, let’s be real, every year I think I forget how to teach when September rolls around. Is it just me? Please tell me it’s not just me!

I’m a big fan of Responsive Classroom and I love the way that they suggest starting off the school year and they give great, practical tips for a successful start up.

I don’t follow this book to the letter but it’s an awesome resource to review before the year starts. It reminds me of all of all of the things that I want to do and go over with my students at the start of the year. I especially love that this book includes sample schedules for the start of the year. These have helped me stay on track.

The Morning Meeting Book

This gem is also by Response Classroom and morning meetings are life so it’s the perfect pairing! If you’ve been following me for a while you know how much I love morning meetings. They have quickly tied daily 5 for my favourite time of the day.

In my opinion, morning meetings are absolutely crucial for building a strong class community and I highly recommend them for all elementary classrooms. This book is a fantastic starting point to go over the four main components of morning meeting and to start you off with some ideas for morning meeting greetings, sharing, activities and morning messages.

The Daily 5

If we got to meet in real life you would know that I am absolutely daily 5 obsessed. Each and every year it’s been my favourite time of the school day. The peaceful and calming atmosphere that is created is absolute bliss and students are so incredibly hard-working during this time. What more could a teacher want?

The Book Whisperer

This book is everything for a book lover! In this book, Donalyn Miller stresses the importance of “just letting kids read” and how important it is to give kids choice in the books that they read. This book also goes over Miller’s 40 book challenge. I am excited to try the 40 book challenge this upcoming school year in my fourth grade classroom and will be sure to blog about it once I have news to share.

Upon reflection after reading this book, I changed my morning routine. I decided that instead of having the typical bell work that I would usually have, students would come in and immediately start reading independently. They would read until we started morning meeting. It was an absolutely beautiful way to start the day and helped everyone to calm and get into a good headspace for the school day.

I’ve always been an avid book lover, even as a small child. Reading this book helped me to better foster a love of books in my students.

A Teacher’s Guide to Reading Conferences

I’ll be honest, I am a huge fan of anything Jennifer Serravallo! I read this book part way through the year and I changed how I did my reading conferences. I’ve read books, talked to teachers, and watched videos about reading conferences. It seems everyone does it a little bit different, which is great but I was looking for something that was clear and concise so that I could make the best out of my time when reading with my students. This book was exactly what I was looking for. It’s a quick read but leaves you with actionable steps for how to carry out effective reading conferences.

Since reading this book, my conferences are to the point and I’ve seen a lot of growth in my students. The best thing about the book is she shares the self assessments, forms, and organization tools that she suggests using and you can access them all for free online with a purchase of the book. I love a book that comes with freebies! I mean, come on!

Understanding Texts & Readers

Here we are with yet another great book by Jennifer Serravallo! This book gives a deep dive to comprehension and helped me to get a good grasp on how well my students are comprehending texts that they read. It gives you actionable steps to support students to build their comprehension and real student examples to be able to better assess your students’ comprehension. I learned a tremendous amount from this book and I highly recommend it.

Word Nerds

This book by Overturf, Montgomery, and Smith really opened my eyes on how I was not doing nearly enough vocabulary instruction with my students. I didn’t know much about the three tiers of words and I certainly wasn’t doing explicit instruction for tier 2 words at the time. That has since changed! It changed the vocabulary instruction in my classroom and I truly wish more teachers read this book. It is an absolute game changer.

The Writing Thief

This book is King when it comes to writing. Or queen, either way! I couldn’t stop highlighting, circling and making notes. Ruth Culham suggests focusing on: writing process, writing traits, using writing workshop, and the writing modes. The thing I love the most about this book is her suggestions of mentor texts to use for various genres of writing. A word of caution: you will end up with a very long list of books you want to purchase. Just sayin!

Passionate Learners

I’m also a huge fan of Pernille Ripp! She is one of my teacher role models. I love all that she stands for and I absolutely love participating in her Global Read Aloud each year. I read Passionate Learners a few years ago and although I would have considered myself to have a student-centered classroom, this book made me re-evaluate some things.

It had me considering ways that I could involve students even more. Pernille shares how she gives her kids regular surveys on how she’s helping them as a teacher and what they truly think of her classroom. I love that!

The Essential 55

I’m not recommending this book for the reasons that you may think. This book is one of the more controversial teacher professional development books that I have read. Some teachers really connect with this book. Let me be clear, this is not a critique of those teachers.

I actually didn’t know about Ron Clark until fairly recently. I’ll admit I was apprehensive of this book because of the “55 rules” in the title. I don’t consider myself a big “rules person”. I don’t mean that I don’t have rules in my classroom but they are more “unspoken rules” that come from building a strong community and treating each other with respect.

I’ll admit that I almost put the book down and did not finish it when I read rule two. It sounded like a simple rule: to make eye contact. I do believe in making eye contact but Ron Clark is a bold person and he takes some of these rules to what I believe is the extreme.

However, I would not disagree that his kids seem to learn a tremendous amount of respect. The way that he structures his classroom just does not necessarily fit with the community that I wish to build. This is not a critic on him as a teacher, it is simply a reflection on my practice and the way that we do some things differently.

With that being said, this book made me think very long and hard about what I believe in as a human and as a teacher. It made me think about how I can better foster respect and community within my own classroom. If you are like me, and you read this book and you don’t find yourself agreeing with everything that Ron Clark says, I urge you to continue and take it as an opportunity to examine your practice and what you can take from this book and incorporate. There are some fantastic gold nuggets and entertaining anecdotes.

Recommendations for Teacher Professional Development Books Wanted

As you can see, I am a huge fan of PD books. In past years, I have been focused on improving my practice in teaching literacy skills. Next up, I look forward to focusing more on improving my math instruction. If you have any great teacher professional development books to recommend please do so in the comments below!