Introducing Your New Love: Professional Reading
Article Summary:
Create a reading routine
Forget about perfect. Go for consistency
Find personal meaning in your reading
Reading is a record of what’s happened before you. Use it to surround yourself with context
“Solving a problem successfully requires that you understand the problem’s underlying structure, as opposed to grouping the problem into categories only defined in your discipline. ”
— David Epstein, Range[1]
Imagine you’re skimming an article in your favorite news outlet about mental health and wellness in schools. Your eye catches a statistic, so you stop and read closer. You see the opening phrase, “A recent study showed . . .” and you feel yourself take the article more seriously.
Mental health and wellness is a topic you’re passionate about. You want to dig deeper and share with your teammates the next day, so you go online and type “mental health and wellness in schools” in a search field.
What you’re looking for is answers. What you get is a wall of text. It looks like some researcher’s stream of consciousness dictated and typed in black, blue, and green letters. There’s no obvious signal of what’s relevant. And with a busy job like yours, you certainly won’t be clicking through every result to find out.
There’s the paradox of professional reading: reading research helps us work challenging education jobs. And yet, our challenging education jobs make it hard to find time to read research.
In this article, I’ll share perspectives that make reading research less daunting for the everyday practitioner. I’ll make a case for why having a reading habit helps us find meaning in our careers in education. I’ll also share practical methods I use to make reading research a regular part of my work day.
The Rebel Reading Routine: Don’t Finish Unless You Want To
It’s been wisely said that perfect is the enemy of the good[2]. Here’s something I learned from over 40 years of reading: To become a prolific reader, I had to stop pressuring myself to finish everything I started.
Let go of perfect and go for good enough and reading will feel less like a chore. There, I said it. Somewhere on earth, the lids of all my grade school teachers just simultaneously flipped. Here’s what good enough looks like:
I read for a few minutes three times a day. Once in the morning before I get ready for work, once during lunch, and one last time before I go to bed. If that seems like a lot, consider that on many days I only read for five minutes each session. On my worst days, I don’t understand much of what I read. It’s not perfect, but perfection is not my target. We can take a cue from professional athletes: What matters more than the volume of reading on any one day is the consistency of the practice over many months[3].
Maybe your routine is reading two abstracts over lunch. Maybe it’s reading a few pages of a book with your morning coffee. Whichever you pick, make it small enough that you can sustain it indefinitely. This consistency will put you in front of many writers’ perspectives over time. These perspectives will be the inspiration for your professional growth, creative problem solving, and discovery of personal interests. It really pays off.
Let’s remind ourselves that as practitioners, we read research to improve our work with students. It’s a means, not an end. Then we can free ourselves of the pressure to read a lot all at once. Instead, we can apply light pressure to read a little, but consistently. This can help us reduce the friction in our reading routines so it becomes a habit[4].
So read a little everyday and don’t worry so much about not finishing everything. You have my permission. You also have novelist Susan Minot’s permission: “More than half of the books I pick up I do not read to the end. It’s not always because I don’t enjoy them, but because I like to graze. As far as rating books go, there is no accounting for taste.”[5]
When it comes to staying in the professional reading game for the long haul, aim for consistency and not perfection.
Be Brave and Follow Your Interests
One of the things that can feel stifling about any job is the job description. At some point, your curiosity brings you to interests that fall outside that job description. How do you pursue those interests? Reading can be a temporary visit to these new intellectual destinations, but only if you let it. And strangely, when you explore interests in the realm of other jobs, you discover new meaning in your actual job.
For example, I was a school psychologist in the early 2000s. I trained in a specific set of skills: assessment, counseling, and consultation, among others. Those were the skills in my job description. As my career progressed, I became interested in hobbies outside of work like data science, writing, and design thinking. As I read more and more about my hobbies, I became less convinced they were separate from my job. So I began exploring how to use these new interests to improve my work at the office. Some ideas fell flat. Others were wildly successful. Today, data science, writing, and design thinking are essential elements of my workflow.
Researching the topics we care about, whether obviously related to our work or not, leads to meaningful self-exploration. And meaning self-exploration can make us available to new creative connections between our personal interests and our work.
Maybe you’re interested in understanding the history of special education policy. Maybe you’re interested in legal case studies that influence our constantly changing procedures. Or maybe you’re interested in the science of behavior intervention. Heck, maybe you’re interested in the life story of some famous figure. Go ahead and read it.
That’s the awesome thing about stories—you’ll get what you need out of it just by reading it from your perspective. For example, Some of the best lessons I’ve learned about effectively addressing interpersonal problems in my education job I got from a book called Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor[6]. Almost two thousand year ago, Marcus Aurelius took breaks from planning military campaigns to write in his diary. Little did he know that in the future I’d use his advice to calm myself so I wouldn’t lose it on a co-worker over something silly like whether a meeting was at 3:00 or 3:30.
So read lots and follow your heart. As Austin Kleon says in his amazing book Steal Like an Artist, “Don’t worry about unity from piece to piece—what unifies all of your work is the fact that you made it.”[7] Same thing goes for reading. Read broadly and don’t worry too much if the connections aren’t obvious. Keep exploring and you’ll realize enough that the connection was you all along.
“Don’t worry about unity from piece to piece—what unifies all of your work is the fact that you made it.”
Reading: The Flux Capacitor of Your Profession
If you had Doc Brown’s time traveling DeLorean from the movie Back to the Future, would you use it? The main character in the movie, Marty McFly, does. Much of the movie is silly, like when Marty says “This is heavy” to the past version of his friend, Doc Brown, who responds, “There’s that word again, ‘heavy.’ Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the Earth’s gravitational pull?”
But the lesson that Marty learns is far from silly. In fact, it’s quite profound. Marty learns that his present day existence is not happening in a vacuum. He isn’t just Marty McFly. He is a continuation of events that go back many years.
Similarly, the issues educators grapple with today have their origins in the past work of others, past events, and past policy. Seemingly modern topics like the distribution of school resources, segregated schooling, and social-emotional learning have a history long before we began our careers.
As educators, we’re not plying our trade on new issues. We are the stewards of a craft developed in the context of our country’s history. Making research an essential part of our work reminds us why we got into this field to begin with. Here are some examples:
Racial segregation continues to be an important topic in education[8]. Reading Rucker Johnson’s Children of the Dream reminds us why. During the years after court-ordered school desegregation, educational attainment, the likelihood of graduation, per-pupil spending, and average class size all improved for Black students[9]. Understanding the history of segregated schooling in our country and the very real effects of desegregation gives us context for our equity work. It keeps us connected to why we must work towards fairer opportunities for all students.
“As educators, we’re not plying our trade on new issues. We are the stewards of a craft developed in the context of our country’s history.”
Another example: How we use data in schools is a hot topic in education[10]. Reading about education policy shows us the connection between how we’ve used data in the last ten years and how we use data today. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was the start of an association between standards, standardized testing data, and perceptions of school quality[11]. This set up a tenuous relationship between data that was often used to punish school leaders and the practitioners who were expected to use that same data. It shouldn’t be surprising that many teachers want to use data more to inform their work, but have such a negative association with it that they run away at the mere mention of it. Understanding the policies that shaped this perception is the first step towards developing a new, more positive relationship with data as part of our decision-making process.
Social and emotional learning (SEL) in schools is yet another important topic. Reading research about SEL’s origins puts us in touch with the original spirit of the practice. School Psychologist Byron McClure wrote about Dr. James Comer, the first African-American to become a full professor at the Yale School of Medicine[12]. Dr. Comer’s work at two elementary schools in Connecticut focused on improving outcomes for students, almost all of which were Black and poor. His innovation was to address educational outcomes by bridging the gap between the life of students in school and the life of students outside of school. McClure traces the events and research inspired by Dr. Comer’s work that evolved into the modern social and emotional learning framework. In doing so, he left us a record of SEL’s original design, which connects practitioners to a larger cause than just implementing a new program.
So next time you feel your curiosity pushing towards an interesting topic, try and dig as far back as you can. You just might see that you’re not starting something new, but instead playing an important part in an ongoing struggle to make schools great for our students.
Not a Chore, But a Treasure Hunt
Here’s the good news: almost anything you want to learn about has been researched and shared on the internet. And the bad news? Almost anything you want to learn about has been researched and shared on the internet.
So the problem at hand isn’t an absence of good stuff. It’s setting up our system so we regularly stumble onto the right stuff. Here are three ways to do this.
First, find good reading by using tools like Google Search, Google Scholar, and the What Works Clearinghouse. Enter the topic you want to learn about into the search field and see what you get. Start skimming headlines and titles and find what pops out at you. If you want, read some abstracts to go a little deeper into what’s been researched. You’re building a sense of what’s out there. It’s not the only part of the process, but it’s an important part of it.
“Almost anything you want to learn about has been researched and shared on the internet.”
Second, find ways for the good reading to find you. Use online services that message you when new studies or news articles appear online. Belle Beth Cooper, a writer for the social media service Buffer, describes how she does this using Google Alerts[13]. She tunes search terms for a topic in her Google Alerts settings. After the alert is set, Google sends the search results to her weekly. Cooper reviews these results and adds stuff she wants to read to her reading list.
And third, find good reading from other people. Your online and offline networks are full of people that have gone deep on a topic. When you imagine your network, think expansively.
For example, inspired by the idea of a networked improvement community[14], I think of learning in three ways: what I learn on my own, what I learn from my teammates, and what I learn from other teams. Over time, each interaction is a chance to discover the right kind of reading. In a network that big, that’s a lot of chances for material to bubble up and show itself to me.
Imagine you’re a school principal and you're researching techniques for leading discussions about student equity. You’ve already done an online search for articles on the topic. Your next move is to ask a colleague what they think you should be reading. Use your social networks to ask questions like, “I’m planning regular discussions about equity at our staff meetings. Does anyone have good resources on the topic?”
Finding good reading is like being at the center of a spider web and taking one step out. With every step you take towards the outer rings of the web, you’re presented with an array of new directions to choose from. So start with that first step. Venture as far out as you can. When you get bored, take a couple steps back and head out in a different direction. This isn’t a chore. It’s a treasure hunt.
New Skills for Internet Reading
More people are using the internet than ever. In the last five years, 640,000 people on average were online on any given day. Social media use has increased steadily since the early 2000s. Mobile phone subscriptions have increased steadily since the 1990s. The internet gives rise to new ways users research and share information through resources like Wikipedia[15].
As with most new technologies, we need to develop new skills before we can use them well. When we hone our research skills, we empower ourselves to greet the firehouse of information with discernment and rigor. Here’s how to use the internet to give you the edge in your reading habits.
There's a lot of information on the internet. When we hone our research skills, we empower ourselves to greet the fire hose of information with discernment and rigor.
First, whenever possible, practice finding the studies that other writers cite in their work. This deepens your understanding beyond the opinions of a single author. Reading through important research articles gives you context and nuance that’s missed in short summaries or opinion pieces. Belle Beth Cooper describes this in her piece about researching for blog posts[14]:
“The discussion section of a study paper usually talks about suggested causes of the results found, caveats to what the study has shown (such as a small sample size or results that apply to a specific group of people only), and related research areas.”
Second, practice getting clear on what you want to know. Doing this will guide how far you dig into primary sources.
My colleague and co-author Joshua Rosenberg at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, told me why getting clear on what he needs to know makes him an efficient reader: When he just needs to know if a topic has been studied, he reads a few abstracts to get a feel for what’s happening in the field. On the other hand, when he needs to explain complex relationships in educational outcomes, he uses abstracts to select research papers for a close read. In the latter case, he needs the context to explain the findings and their limitations.
Joshua shared another great piece of reading advice: Pay attention to the ongoing work of authors you’ve read before. Over time, you’ll become familiar with their work, which will strengthen your content knowledge and empower you to speak confidently about the perspective of major players in the field. And as a bonus, the context you have from previous reading will help you make connections to the topic better.
Here’s an example: If you need to share that researchers have studied grade retention, review abstracts of frequently cited articles. If you need to share about the relationship between grade retention and dropout rates, review abstracts and then select one to two frequently cited articles for a close read. And if you happen upon a paper written by an author you’ve read before, add that one to your list of articles to read.
Conclusion
We begin our careers as educators learning the skills required to accomplish our job duties. As we progress in our careers, we then explore our unique delivery of these skills. We might also start reflecting on our motivations for becoming educators in the first place.
And that’s the perspective I’d like to close with. Developing a professional reading habit helps you clarify the personal meaning behind your work. It gives you a vehicle to explore your professional curiosities. It reminds you that you are not alone in this craft. You join others in the education community who are asking similar questions to yours. And you join educators from the past by respecting and building on their work.
When we fuse this personal meaning with the daily tactics of our work, we create an opportunity to include reading in our demanding work day where it counts—in service to our students. And over time, our professional reading will transform from just another thing to do into a daily moment of peace, reflection, and growth.
I wrote a version of this piece for the Maryland School Psychologists Association’s newsletter, Protocol. If you’d like to join the MSPA or write for the next issue of Protocol, contact Dr. Julie Grossman on Twitter. Thank you for reading!
Notes
Epstein, David. Range: Why Generalists Triumph In a Specialized World. Riverhead Books, 2019.
This idea was so popular throughout history that I had a hard time figuring out who to credit with the quote. I was going to go with Winston Churchill, but turns out there were versions of it as far back as the late 1700s. See Wikipedia. “Perfect is the enemy of good.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good. Accessed 6 September 2021.
Clear, James. Atomic Habits. Penguin Random House, 2018.
Parker-Pope, Tara. “To Start a New Habit, Make It Easy.” The Chicago Tribune, 23 January 2021, https://www.chicagotribune.com/advice/sns-nyt-healthy-habits-20210123-kbeh24je7jfzdnh4x7bbnbkbvu-story.html. Accessed 26 February 2021.
Tamaki, Jillian. “For Comfort Reading, Susan Minot Turns to Comic Writers.” The New York Times, 14 January 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/14/books/review/susan-minot-by-the-book-interview.html. Accessed 6 September 2021.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated by Martin Hammond, Penguin Classics, 2006.
Kleon, Austin. Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. New York, Workman Publishing Company, Inc., 2012.
Whitehurst, Grover J., et al. “60 years after Brown v. Board of Education, how racially balanced are America’s public schools?” Brookings, 20 November 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/research/60-years-after-brown-v-board-of-education-how-racially-balanced-are-americas-public-schools/. Accessed 26 February 2021.
Johnson, Rucker C. Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works. Basic Books, 2019.
By the way, I’m writing a book about this which I’m very excited about. It’ll be available for pre-order in late 2021. Estrellado, Ryan. The K–12 Educator's Data Guidebook: Reimagining Practical Data Use in Schools. Routledge, 2022.
Ravitch, Diane. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Basic Books, 2010.
McClure, Byron. “Did You Know That SEL Emerged Because of a Black Man? The True History of SEL.” Lessons for SEL, 25 July 2020, https://www.lessonsforsel.com/post/did-you-know-that-sel-emerged-because-of-a-black-man-the-true-history-of-sel. Accessed 26 February 2021.
Cooper, Belle Beth. “How We Research: A Look Inside the Buffer Blog Process.” Buffer Blog, 24 March 2014, https://buffer.com/resources/how-we-research-a-look-inside-the-buffer-blog-process/. Accessed 26 February 2021.
Bryk, Anthony S., et al. Learning to Improve: How America’s Schools Can Get Better at Getting Better. Harvard Press, 2015.
Roser, Max, et al. “The Internet's History Has Just Begun.” Our World in Data, https://ourworldindata.org/internet.
