The Blog
When we're planning for the new school year, we're often thinking about classroom set up, decorations, start-of-the-year activities/events, and even what our first book or reading might be to welcome students. While those aspects are important, they're not the crux of teaching. You can have all...
I know people really love this book and they struggle to let it go. One of the biggest hesitations expressed is that it's a great fodder for conversations about race(ism). However, my response to that is: it's written by a White woman and it is therefore limited in its scope. There will be...
When I started teaching, I worked at a high school. The youngest child I taught was 14. When I transitioned to a smaller independent school and started teaching 6th grade, I realized 11 year olds were still very, very, young! I remember the day one of them lost a tooth in class and I thought to...
When working with emergent bilinguals in the classroom it is important to have a well-developed toolbox of strategies that celebrates their strengths and builds on their needs. This work doesn’t have to be a mystery. It is about intention and preparation. In this blog post,...
Are you a school leader who wants to start or continue (in the early stages of) inclusivity work at your school? Are you unsure of how to start by building a strong foundation?
Not doing this work at your school sets you up for failure. What will you say if/when one of your teachers lands...
Addressing difficult or tense conversations in a classroom is difficult enough, without being prepared with a set of norms or protocol. Not only can the topics be tense, but the process of the conversation can be challenging if people are not aware of what is appropriate or how to...
Still on Island Vibes and Processing…
Our family went on a family vacation recently to Dominican Republic. We took our three kids (7, 4, and 1 year old) and it was their first time out of the country. It was their first time seeing the land where I was born and where both of...
Taking anti bias and antiracist (ABAR) ideas into practice is something like reinventing the wheel. Most of us didn't experience that in our own k-12 educational journeys, so we need to reimagine and reinvent teaching and learning in order to dream what ABAR teaching and learning might look...
Unit themes are at the core of most English Language Arts (or ELA) classrooms, which begs the questions: what are you teaching beyond books? How are your course themes also a proponent of social justice and critical literacy? This is what #DisruptTexts means when they explain that work...
