Professional readings include any reading that relates to education and has a quality in its foundation that usually derives from research or extended experience and reflections. This can include blog posts (provided the author is reputable), journals, academic books, books focusing on practical applications, fact sheets, presentation notes, and much more. Personally, I love reading books or listening to Audiobooks, I find that this provides greater depth to enough breadth for the learning to be readily useful.
Engaging in professional readings is useful in many ways. Firstly, it allows us to stay relatively up-to-date with our knowledge of pedagogy. Often I chat with teachers who haven’t read anything since they studied at University or think that the books have nothing to say about actual practice and therefore avoid them. But these are both mistakes. Today there are numerous quality books that are based on solid research and have a lot of practical applications that could possibly revolutionise your classroom. Quality books such as Hattie and Yates Visible Learning and the Science of How People Learn and William Embedded Formative Assessment are just two such examples. These kinds of books show us what works, what research and science is currently telling us about the way students learn, and how we can help them learn in our classrooms.
Professional reading also provides us with great ideas for us to try out in our classrooms or in our general practices that could improve what we do in our lessons. These books are often easier to read, requiring less in-depth focus and deciphering, but at the same time provide great actionable steps to improve our lessons. These books are not necessarily void of evidence or research, they just have a different focus and are written for the perspective of classroom practice. A few examples include Clark and Avrith's The Google Infused Classroom, MacKenzie Dive Into Inquiry, or Bell Dynamic Learning. Each of these books provides great ideas for how you can make learning come more alive in your lessons.