Empowering young people to live their best lives grounds our work as educators and unionists. Focusing on the quality of our own knowledge base allows us to do our best work.

This summer, I built that knowledge base by taking local trips to the Whitney Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, catching a few shows on Broadway, watching “The Gilded Age” and “Washington Black” on TV, and spending quality time with friends and family.

I also prepared for the year ahead by reading as much as possible, from thrillers and memoirs to romances and historical studies. All of this reading, whether via audiobook on the Libby app or print copies purchased on Bookshop, expanded my worldview while allowing me a brain break.

I was reminded of the value to educators and students in being able to access new ideas and words. The academic language needed to grasp content material is foreign to many of our students. Reading — the result of a complex series of steps that requires intentional instruction so that it becomes automatic for the students we teach — builds such language.

Effective reading is instrumental to lifelong learning.

Through recent professional learning coursework, I came to understand that the strategies underlying the effective instruction of reading benefit all young people, including multilingual learners, students requiring learning accommodations and students with interrupted formal education.

And as the state of New York looks to expand opportunities to prepare high school graduates for post-secondary education, it is clear that integrated student-centered learning and strong reading comprehension grounded in the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework will be key.

One of my coursework classmates, school librarian Rachel Altvater of Manhattan Comprehensive Night & Day HS, introduced me to the Sora app. Available to students and educators on TeachHub, Sora gives students access to developmentally appropriate reading material and allows educators to create challenges that make reading fun for students. It was fantastic to learn from Rachel some of the ways in which I can empower my students using free available technology.

Giving students a choice of reading material allows them to develop their reading ability while grappling with texts that interest them. Expanding my own knowledge base by being an avid reader helps me to better guide my students’ choices and widen their knowledge of texts with which they might connect.

I am a proud, card-carrying patron of the Brooklyn and New York public libraries, and with the Libby app, I can access both bestsellers and the classics to enjoy as audiobooks or read in their digital form.

My latest read is “Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough,” an award-winning cultural and social history of the early development of Brooklyn. I plan to use this text as the foundation of the elective I teach on the history of New York City in my Brooklyn school.

Adolescents’ ability to connect with the characters and plot lines in a piece of text — be it a memoir, a historical text, historical fiction or a graphic novel — will be key to engaging them in learning.

As educators, when we engage with a variety of texts on a regular basis, we not only expand our personal knowledge base but also make those connections for our students in our classrooms.