What We’re Reading: Inspiration for the New School Year🌞📚

Digging Deeper:
Summer Reading to Expand Your Thinking

Summer sometimes offers that free time and space to read. We thought this could be an opportune time to share some of the books we’re reading right now that also have expanded our own thinking and approach to the collective work we’re doing in education. Take a look at our reading list below!

Unearthing Joy: this book is a guide for educators that highlights joy as an essential pursuit in teaching, alongside identity, skills, intellect, and criticality. Muhammad provides practical strategies, lesson plans, and curriculum ideas for creating joyful, culturally responsive classrooms that foster wellness, beauty, healing, and justice by integrating students’ cultural and historical realities, moving beyond a narrow focus on skills to cultivate the whole child.

Dare to Lead: in this book, Brené Brown shows what courageous leadership—grounded in vulnerability, trust, and values—can look like. For our community, we believe it can help education leaders build stronger relationships, navigate challenging conversations, support educator growth, and create positive, high-trust school cultures.

Teaching with a Social, Emotional, and Cultural Lens: the foundation of our work, based on over a decade of pioneering work in education. Not only does it explain and dive deeply into our Anchor Competencies Framework, it provides practical examples, case studies, and tools to begin bringing this work into teacher preparation and development efforts. This book has served as a transformational tool for educators to intentionally and explicitly integrate a focus on the social, emotional, and cultural dimensions of teaching and learning!

Want a copy of our book? Order here!

Insights & Resources

We are excited to share the publication of a new book chapter, Beyond the Script: A Roadmap for Reframing SEL for Preservice Educators in an Era of Prepackaged Curriculum, co-authored by Dr. Rachel Satter (Oregon State University), our Executive Director Dr. Rebecca Baelen, and our Director of Learning Innovation & Research Dr. Halley Maza.

Published in Critical and Theoretical Perspectives on Scripted Curricula (IGI Global, 2026), the chapter explores the growing use of scripted SEL curricula in schools and how we can prepare educators to move beyond scripted curricula to integrate SEL into academic instruction. The chapter also examines what it means to prepare preservice teachers for this complex social emotional work. See our latest blog post below for most details on the chapter and how to read it

Learn More Here

CRTWC in Action:

Now & Next

AI Usage in Educator Preparation: Our Center worked alongside the Residency Lab to develop a new framework, “Intentional AI Usage in Educator Preparation.” The framework has just been published and accepted for presentation at the NASDTEC Annual Conference this fall. We’re excited to share this resource more broadly and support educator preparation programs with implementing AI through a social, emotional, cultural, and equity-centered lens. We look forward to telling you more about the breakout session in a future newsletter!

Check Out the New AI Framework Here

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