What, exactly, is in a distillation?

Distillations contain the key points that we think educators and school leaders will find relevant from each book. We hope that these distillations will help you find information quickly allowing you to make informed decisions about which book(s) will be valuable to your practice. Leading books are those we have categorized as relevant to school administrators or teacher leaders. Learning books are more helpful for those still in the classroom. Clicking on a book cover will bring you to a summary of the distillation. You can access the full distillations at the end of each summary page. The distillations are broken down into the following sections. You can also search for book distillations by topic or keyword.

Think you might want to read this book?
We want to offer a quick paragraph for those who think they may be interested in the entire book. We hope to give you a sense of what it’s like to read the book, what kinds of concepts you might learn and which audiences in particular might enjoy it.

What would Socrates ask?
We want to offer the ideas that were generated within the book as well as the ones we thought of while reading it. We hope that these questions form the foundation of thinking about what’s possible within all of our schools. These questions include our own questions as readers and educators, so while all questions are inspired by each book, some questions come from our attempts as educators to apply abstract ideas to concrete practices in school.

Research
We want to offer research in case it helps spark progress in schools. Change is often made smoother when we can explain why we are moving in a certain direction and sometimes relaying research helps in that endeavor.

Concepts
We want the concepts that are applicable to education to be teased out so that we can improve our schools.

Quotes from the author and quotes from others
Similar to the explanation for research above, we want to provide reasoning and rationale for changes that we are making and quoting others sometimes helps.

Implement tomorrow? 
We want to relay leading and learning tips that are easily implemented so that those looking to make changes fast have an avenue to do that.

Organizations/schools working on answers 
It is always good to see what others are doing. This section is meant to connect us to schools and groups doing work mentioned in the book.

Gateways to further learning
Sometimes a book opens our mind to a new idea and we want to dive further. This section is meant to inspire that deeper dive.fill that void.

Referenced books with the potential to impact leading and learning in education
We wanted to acknowledge all of the books that are referenced within the book that could impact education. Hopefully, a book that is highly impactful in your school will also provide other books that might shed light on how we could improve schools.

The applicability of this book to education is ….
We are reading a range of books. Our books fall on the obvious in terms of their impact on education (think: Mindset) to the abstract (think: Uberland). Our hope is that those only interested in obvious connections will use this continuum to find those books and those looking to stretch how we normally look to improve schools will be able to find those books more quickly as well.