Dr. Robin Bright, interim Dean of Education at the University of Lethbridge, explores the paths students follow in their reading development with empathy and heart. She focuses her work around both student perspective and teacher experience. I especially relate to this excerpt: "Even at my most confident as a teacher, I stayed awake at night thinking about my students and how to support and inspire them in their reading. It's possible that you do too. The solution is to work at it. Just like reading is a skill that you must work at to master, so is teaching reading. It doesn't just pop out of the air, if you want to reach all of your students, you need to develop a large toolbox of skills."

I picked up this read by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates on recommendation from a colleague at Prairie Rose. This book illustrates powerful connection between practice, research, and experience. It's an accessible overview of how the science of reading has evolved, and where current scientific understanding lies. The piece I found especially valuable was the way it illustrated shifts in practice to be more aligned to our best understanding of how readers learn, based on science.

This series of letters by Maryanne Wolf isn't necessarily education focused, but includes important neuroscience, psychology, and literary interpretations of how our reading brains are evolving as we engage more and more with the digital medium.

Wolf concludes with a hopeful yet cautionary letter on the shape our critical, empathic, and reflective capacities might need to evolve toward and how our views of those capacities as educators matters, as our students, as well as ourselves. are immersed in this digital world.