Here are this month’s best articles, analyses, and stories in education from across the web! This month you’ll learn about classroom strategies for designing better teenager learning environments, receive some summer reading suggestions for improving emotional resilience, and how new teaching roles and blended learning are helping students succeed. In addition, we share a piece that highlights five students’ college entrance essays on money and social class. Enjoy!

Sparking Student Strengths At School with Chris Wejr (Thriving Schools)

What you’ll learn: “We all know the importance of strong student relationships. And we’ve all been shown a plethora of techniques to help create them. But we’re willing to bet one of the most important strategies for doing this is one you haven’t spent much time thinking about. It’s as simple as focusing on a strudent’s strengths!”

Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life Of The Teenage Brain (Getting Smart)

What you’ll learn: “Readers can gain broader insights from this research that could be used as guiding principles when designing learning environments for adolescents.”

Teachers: Summer Reading To Cultivate Your Emotional Resilience (Edutopia)

What you’ll learn: “Immerse yourself in these books to renew yourself for the coming school year.”

Narrating Positive Behavior: Talking to Students Vs Talking About Students (Teach Like A Champion)

What you’ll learn: “Narrating the positive that focuses on talking about kids is most useful when you are installing a system . . . you are trying to call attention to the behaviors that are (or will be) normal ‘here.’”

Addressing The School Discipline Crisis With Great Teaching (Teach For America)

What you’ll learn: “What have we learned from teachers who are having a game-changing impact on students, and what more must we learn from them as we seek to reverse course on the school discipline crisis?”

‘The Emotional Scars Run Deep’: Stories From Teachers Who Survived School Shootings (Ed Week)

What you’ll learn: “Two teachers and eight students were killed in the fatal shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, las week. It was the 13th school shooting since the beginning of the year. Four teachers who have experienced gun violence at school share their stories.”

From EdCamps To Google, 11 Professional Development Offerings For Teachers This Summer (Ed Surge)

What you’ll learn: “To help you stay sharp while getting that much-needed vitamin D, we have gathered a list of professional development activities geared towards teachers, offered for free or at relatively low-cost.”

Seven Strategies for Improving Student Feedback (John Spencer)

What you’ll learn: “We explore how to integrate feedback into every part of the learning process so that students can increase in metacognition during their PBL and design thinking projects.”

5 High Schoolers And Their College Application Essays About Work, Money, and Social Class (New York Times)

What you’ll learn: “Each year, we ask students to send in college application essays that have something to do with money. Here are five that stood out.”

New Report:

Innovative Staffing To Personalize Learning: How New Teaching Roles and Blended Learning Help Students Succeed (Christensen Institute)

What you’ll learn: “We examine how eight pioneering district, charter, and private schools and school networks with notable student success adopted blended learning and new staffing arrangements to better enable personalized instruction.”