Usually the one I am reading at the time! A lot of the things I do in the classroom are based on books I am reading ... A lot of times I will read something and the next day I will run it by the students. I usually read the books that do fit in with the curriculum that we are doing at the time. It is a stimulus to me ... If I weren't reading a good book, I would be a boring person.

For example, when I was reading "A Fierce Green Fire" a biography of Aldo Leopold by Marybeth Lorbiecki, there was a sentence I wanted to work out and so I shared it with the students: "No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions," he wrote. "In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial."

Nineteenth Century naturalists ... I value what they valued. Not that modern naturalists have lost these values, it is just they have been displaced or covered up or ... I don't know. What I want to do with the kids, is that I want them to really get to know an environment and to do that you ahve to get messy, dirty and that is what these 19th C naturalists were doing .. Thoureau would walk into a bog up to his neck just to know what it was like ... I started reading about John Burroughs whose contemporaries were Muir and people like Henry Ford and Teddy Roosevelt ... But what he was was a writer and so I read about him and then I go to find some of his books ... Everything from nature to a study of Walt Whitman (who was a friend of his) and he did a biography of Walt Whitman.

• Wake Robin (John Burroughs) I received as a gift ...

• Thomas Huxley who advocated Darwin's theory ... And he also advocated science for the masses and laboratory science in the schools. And so I read his 600-page biography which was quite enthralling and used some of my things there with the kids ... And then I remembered that I had some of his books ...Twenty years ago I had bought "Man's Place in Nature and Other Anthropological Essays" which was printed in 1898. "A History of Life on Earth" probably came from this essay ... it has become a throughline for me...the history of life on earth...

• I was an avid reader of Darwin for three or four years... Including a massive volume of his notes and notebooks. VOYAGE OF THE BEAGLE is one of my favorites ... since High school and I return to it a lot. Huxley also voyaged for three years on a boat as a naturalist and when he came back bought in to Darwin.

• Some of the early naturalists this century [are influential]. Reading the Mountains of Home by John Elder is a reflective essay by a literature teacher on Robert Frost's "Directive" ... It is literally about the Vermont landscape and how the history (there is the history of life again) over eons. "The chisel work of an enormous Glacier That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole." We are talking about the Ice Age and what the landscape had to go through ... There is the history of life on earth again.

• My favorite education book is "Experience in Education" by John Dewey ... It was a short essay that kind of summed up his philosophy. I have always like Dewey because his experimental school wasn't about teaching, it was about TFU. We want to know why certain things work and certain things don't work ... His school was a research center ... And that just makes sense to me. I try to make the school a research center that with my science staff ... It gets us to self reflect and certainly your teaching is going to improve with a process like that. We try to work teacher with teacher so that there is feedback ...

• Other books include Jerome S. Bruner Toward a Theory of Instruction and On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand and Carol Gilligan's In A Different Voice .

• I have the students read Farley Mowat Never Cry Wolf (that is the main one of his that I like) and King Solomon's Ring by Conrad Lorenz and Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Not to mention The Edge of the Sea by Rachel Carson and that covers the important ones right there. NOTE: All of these books are used in the culturing Unit but refer to them/reflect back with passages from them.

Pictures of Practice Contents Introduction The Colonial Biography Unit (7th Grade History) A Year of Seventh Grade English A Year of Eighth Grade Science The Jazz Unit Snapshot Using the CCDT to Develop Generative Topics