My Summer Reading List: 15 Articles Guaranteed to Inspire Teachers for Back-to-School

Professional Development and Inspiration

Building and working through a summer reading list is one of the best parts of vacation.

While summer reading is usually beachy, frothy, and fun, this year I surprised myself: I mostly read informational texts. Even though it’s summer break, my mind has stayed in my classroom.

As I’ve been reading, I collected the best articles from my summer reading list, and now I want to share them with you! While I read these articles between May and July, some titles may be older.

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Reading About Reading

In addition to loving a summer reading list, I also adore baseball season! I’m a Kansas City Royals fan, and while our season has been rocky, I continue to cheer! During commercial breaks, there is often an ad about the Royals Foundation and its work with local elementary schools. One of the speakers says, “there’s a reading crisis in the United States,” which captures a sentiment all-too-familiar in education. When the small market baseball team starts to think about teaching reading, you know there’s a problem, which is why I think so much of my summer reading list focused on reading about reading.

Reading for Pleasure Has Declined by a ‘Deeply Concerning’ 40 Percent Over the Past Two Decades by Sarah Kuta from Smithsonian Magazine is a short but frank discussion of a decline in joyful reading across the US. This article affirms the kind of attention decay that teachers witness every day; it also evaluates different causes for the decline in reading for pleasure. More than anything, this article affirmed the value of creating protected time for students to read according to their interests.

What We Lose When We Gamify Reading by Marissa Levien from LitHub was good food for thought. In this article, Levien takes up the idea of book goals. Personally, I’m not good at (or all that interested in) tracking my own reading, but Levien points to the different ways readers track themselves. Levien argues that book goals can take away the wonder and discover of slow and immersive reading and can, perhaps inadvertently, discourage readers from recursive or frustrating texts. As a teacher, this made me wonder about ways to reframe reading goals for students.

Stop Saying Kids Can’t Read by Megan Greenwell for WIRED is the most recent article on this list. I just finished reading this before I started this post. Greenwell focuses on teachers in Jackson County, Mississippi and discusses some of the gritty parts of the Mississippi Miracle. As a teacher, I struggle a lot with the methods employed in the Mississippi Miracle, some of which Greenwell discusses. In particular, Greenwell highlights the reality of canned or scripted curriculum, reliance on programs like iReady, and intense standardized testing pressure. Greenwell’s article also doesn’t fully endorse or deride Mississippi’s methods; instead, she tries to give a boots-on-the-ground recounting of what it’s like to teach in that environment.

The Claims of Close Reading by Johanna Winant from the Boston Review is actually an article I’ve revisited several times since it was published in November. Written in the context of upheaval at West Virginia University, this article tracks the use of close reading and the reasons close reading might be threatening. Winant ends by noting that “close reading is not magic” but can be the foundation of magical interpretation, analysis, and argument. As someone who values teaching close reading, I appreciated the way Winant describes its slow, steady nature.

These were the 11 most challenged books in 2025 by Emily Temple from LitHub represents a larger swath of my reading. Articles about censorship have been consistent in my reading, especially in the past year. Like most ELA teachers, I’ve dealt with book challenges in the past, but it seems like there’s an increase in censorship attempts and in capitulation to the censors. If you’d like to keep reading about censorship and academic freedom, checkout this Pinterest board where I catalogue each article I’ve read on the subject.

Are Books Really Disappearing From American Classrooms? by Sarah Schwartz from EducationWeek echoes one of the worst trends in education: reading excerpts rather than books. It is difficult to really delve into standards about plot structure and character development when students are limited to an excerpt rather than a full novel. For example, the narrative frame on The Odyssey is lost if you only read “The Cyclops,” and the narrative frame is an important part of both story structure and Odysseus’ character development. Schwartz’s writing also touches on the attention decay described by Kuta and Greenwell.

Edtech Highlights

A lot of my summer reading list has focused on generative AI (more about that next week), but #edtech is never far from the headlines. In addition to reading about ChatGPT and all its bot friends, I’ve also read several articles about the general malaise in edtech.

Over 20,000 educators share insights on school cell phone policies from Penn Today discusses the work of Angela Duckworth et al. as they survey attitudes towards phones in schools. Through their Phones in Focus group, Ducketwork et al. capture the gusto of the “no cell phones in schools” movement, noting that support for schoolwide cell phone bans is increasing, gaining steam across the US. The National Governors Association has an interview with Duckworth that helps contextualize the work of Phones in Focus. Pew Research Center also has data to show how attitudes about school cell phone bans have evolved.

The myth of multitasking, the mistaken belief that we can give adequate attention to multiple tasks at once, is persistent. I read three different articles about how using laptops and similar devices during class can adversely affect student learning. Using devices in class constitutes a kind of multitasking that can actually inhibit learning. In particular, I was struck by Hall et al.’s findings about how one off-task student can affect the behavior of those nearby even when the off-task behavior is something innocuous like surfing the web.

Dividing attention in the classroom reduces exam performance by Arnold L. Glass and Mengxue Kang for Educational Psychology
The laptop and the lecture: The effects of multitasking in learning environments by Helene Hembrooke and Geri Gay for Journal of Computing in Higher Education
On or off task: The negative influence of laptops on neighboring students’ learning depends on how they are used by Amanda C.G. Hall et al. for Computer & Education
Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing (in 6 Charts) by Youki Terada for Edutopia isn’t expressly about multitasking, but Terada captures why simpler (pencil and paper) is sometimes better for student learning.

The Importance of Teaching All Students About Tech Accessibility Features by Tolulope Noah from Edutopia may be the most pro-edtech article on my summer reading list. While I wasn’t conscious of it during my reading, most of the edtech articles I read this summer and that I chose to share caution against overreliance on classroom technology. However, Noah discusses technology in the context of accessibility, which I can sometimes overlook. More than anything, Noah’s article frames technology as a tool that can be empowering in the right situation.

Reading for My Nerd Heart

While a lot of my summer reading list evaluated educational trends, some of the best parts of my summer reading list were the nerdy deep dives! I chose three of my favorites to share with you.

Q&A: Patrick Stewart on performing Shakespeare’s sonnets from Folger Shakespeare Library is maybe my favorite part of the summer reading list. Folger has interviewed Patrick Stewart about the process of creating his new audiobook Patrick Stewart Performs the Complete Sonnets of William Shakespeare. In this post, Folger captures audio and video recordings of Stewart’s readings. I love to teach Shakespearean sonnets, so this article really spoke to my nerdy heart.

Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise by Russell Samora with design and illustration by Shelly Tan for The Pudding marries my love of literature with my love of data. Samora and Tan analyze 200,000 similes from popular literature to see which ones occur the most often. This article is engaging and charming, and, of the titles on my summer reading list, the most visually stunning. I’m trying to figure out how I can incorporate this in my classroom!

A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects by Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton for Smithsonian Magazine is another article I’m trying to figure out how to incorporate in my classroom. Accents and dialects play an important part in literature: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Beloved are just a few novels where the way a character speaks is as important as the content of their speech. My undergrad course about this history of English was so long ago, and this article provides an attainable breakdown of American speech.