I'm in this book club. It's really more a meeting of the minds than anything else. We choose books based on educational topics we would like to learn more about. These have included books such as Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System, which discusses, among other things, the implications of No Child Left Behind and her changed views of high stakes testing. Our latest book was How to Grade for Learning by Ken O'Connor, a book that really made me think about how I grade and how I assess my students.

I cannot and will not claim to be a great teacher. I'm still very much in a learning phase of my career. I've only been doing this for two years, and there's no way that I've got it completely right yet. But I often take what I read in these kind of books as gospel. I think that is an awesome feeling because I know that my philosophies are being shaped and I can really base how I act as an educator on these ideas.

These meetings inevitably get thrown off topic and we meander into more broadly the big ideas of how we can change the world. Surely David Levin and Mike Feinberg had these kind of feelings before KIPP. I get from this book club a sense of community that there are really people dedicated to education for the right reason of helping kids.

Here's the deal, though. Sometimes I'll sit at our book club discussions and think that all we are doing is whining. We're reading these fascinating ideas and we wind down into big overarching ideas, and I think the piece that is missing is the "and this is what I'm going to do about it" phase.

So today, I thinking about what I'm going to do about it.