Engaging Educators as Scholar-Practitioners

Welcome to the Scholar-Practitioner Nexus. This website is an outgrowth of our book, On Being a Scholar-Practitioner: Wisdom in Action.  In the book, we stress the importance of Communities of[...]

Educational policy makers, philanthropic foundations, and school reformers have struggled for years with the difficulty of improving the quality of public education, especially among the most economically distressed districts. In[...]

As educators, we are living in unprecedented times. The closing of schools throughout the United States has forced us, ready or not, to alternative ways of teaching and learning. We[...]

Cohen, David K. Teaching and Its Predicaments. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Teaching and Its Predicaments Educator David Cohen offers a compelling framework for thinking about the nature of[...]

Nicholas A. Christakis. Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society.  New York: Little, Brown, Spark, 2019. The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society Nicholas Christakis is a physician and[...]

Delbanco, Andrew. College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). College: What It Was, Is and Should Be This book examines the role of colleges[...]

Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. (New York: Scribner, 2016). Grit Intrigued by the question of why some individuals excel and others fail to reach their potential,[...]

Golden, Daniel. The Price of Admission: How American's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates. (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006). The Price of[...]

Jack, Anthony Abraham. The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. The Privileged Poor Anthony Jack begins by acknowledging that elite universities[...]

Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist. (New York: One World, 2019). How to Be an Antiracist In this thought-provoking book, Kendi holds a mirror up to racism, seeing[...]

Labaree, David F. A Perfect Mess: The Unlikely Ascendancy of American Higher Education. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017). A Perfect Mess This book gives an extremely useful (and[...]

Educators are experiencing metrics mania, the overvalued use of numbers to gauge and measure complex social phenomena that results in oversimplified understandings and unintended consequences. This short read provides a[...]

Ravitch, Diane. Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools. New York: Alfred A. Knopp, 2020. Slaying Goliath This book is must reading for anyone[...]

Schwartz, Barry & Sharpe, Kenneth. Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing. (New York: Riverhead Books, 2010). Practical Wisdom Schwartz and Sharpe offer an insightful analysis of[...]

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. (New York: Random House, 2012). Anatifragile This is not a particularly easy book to read, but contains a number of interesting[...]

Tough, Paul. How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character. Boston: Houghton, Miffline, Harcourt, 2012. How Children Succeed What makes the difference between students who succeed and[...]

Tough, Paul. Helping Children Succeed: What Works and Why. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016. Helping Children Succeed In this follow-up to his New York Times bestseller, How Children Succeed, journalist[...]

Tough, Paul. The Years that Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019 The Years that Matter Most In this book, Paul Tough turns[...]