Best of 2025

an eclectic mix of new art, new ideas, and new experiences

Happy New Year friends and colleagues!

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been home here with our kids who are on vacation. We didn’t travel anywhere, so spent most of our days rewatching and watching Stranger Things, playing board games, and sharing meals together. I always enjoy reading other people’s “best of” lists and decided to try one out for the first time. So here is a “best of,” a few things that caught my attention this year, related to education and beyond.

As a side note these are all the best of each category I experienced last year, not necessarily things that were released or published during 2025.

Best TV Series: Slow Horses

From the times when I watched James Bond as a kid with my father, I’ve always loved a good spy story. Gary Oldman’s portrayal of a unkept but incredibly competent spy is captivating. The episodes move along briskly and each season has an overall mystery to be solved. Loved every minute of it.

Best Movie: Poor Things

I’m a bit late to this one. If you like movies that are quirky and offer expansively imaginative and even surrealistic worlds then this is one not to miss. It was close between this one and Michael B. Jordan’s Sinners but I think the overall inventiveness of this film wins out for me.

Best Book: Hyperion by Dan Simmons

My father reads almost exclusively science fiction. I never fully appreciated the genre and generally thought, in my younger years, as an English teacher, I should be reading “better” fiction. My reading habits have changed over the last few years and a friend of mine recommended the book Hyperion claiming “It’s the best science fiction series of all time.” After reading the series it’s certainly the best that I’ve read in the limited time I’ve been reading the genre. It has the structure of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales following the individual and interrelated stories of interstellar pilgrims on a quest. It’s gripping and literary. So I get the best of both worlds!

Best Board Game Experience: Harmonies

In 2025 I played 112 different in-person board games for a total of 488 plays. Yes, that’s more than an average of a board game every day. Last summer we were leading a professional development day for a High Tech High school in San Diego. During the lunch break I noticed a group of teachers next to us playing a board game. They invited me to play and we played right up to the bell! Harmonies has a captivating table presence and is easy to introduce to anyone. In the game you are building an ecosystem and then populating the topographical map with animals. It plays in about 30 minutes.

Although I loved this lunchtime gaming experience, my overall favorite game that was released this year is Galactic Cruise, a game in which you plan the logistics for launching a cruise ship into space. It’s remarkably complex though (the rulebook is 50 pages) and probably not for most folks that haven’t played a game of this level of difficulty.

One for everyone is a new party game originally from Japan, ITO. We played this at our school Habla’s staff holiday party. In ITO you have a category, i.e. things that make you sleepy. Each person has a secret number between 1 and 100 and offers an answer to the prompt that corresponds to the number they have on their card. For instance, thinking about the prompt above, the number 100 might correspond to the word “anesthesia” and a low number might pair with “caffeine.” Then the entire group reveals their numbers and if they are in the correct order, everyone wins! Any group I’ve introduced to this game wants to play it over and over again.

Best Education Substacks: The Bell Ringer and Adrian’s Newsletter

Admittedly I’m relatively new to Substack, both as a reader and writer. For authors reading this I’ve enjoyed reading many of your posts about education and I’ve been excited to find a space beyond formal journals and books to read about ideas in action.

Holly Korbey of The Bell Ringer is a close friend and colleague, and although we’ve been working in education for years, we’ve taken different paths: she as an education journalist and me as teacher and school leader. Through Holly’s writing, and the cognitive scientists, researchers, and educators she highlights, I’ve been rethinking practices that need to be combined with the instructional approaches I’ve embraced over the last thirty-five years. Too often, educational practices are framed as a binary—traditional or progressive—with each side dismissing the other. Pulling from the best of both, I believe, is how we craft learning experiences that offer students both deep content and deep engagement.

And speaking of a beautiful synthesis of practices—Adrian’s work on his own newsletter amazes me. He teaches 5th graders and writes about his classroom in ways that clearly illuminate his on-the-ground practice while also thoughtfully engaging with the broader field of education.

Best New-to-Me Education Book: Why Don’t Students Like School? by Daniel Willingham

I’d read his book on teaching reading before, The Reading Mind, which I appreciated, but it was this book that really caught my attention. Approaching learning from the perspective of a cognitive scientist brought a new lens to considering how to design learning experiences in the classroom. Each chapter takes on a different aspect of the “mind’s operation” and the implications for teaching that we should consider. I will admit that the “practice” suggestions at the end of every chapter are lacking. But I see that as more of a call to action for us as teachers—to develop the practices from what the research suggests. I love how he consolidates the research on how the mind works and brings it to us in such an accessible way.

Hope you all have a great year and thanks for reading and supporting our work.

All the best,

Kurt Wootton