The Blog
The National Center for Education Statistics has shared the news from their 2020 and 2021 research. One of the striking statistics that I think we need to meditate on is that out of 49 million public school students, 27.2 million of them are students of color. White students comprise 22.4...
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 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,...
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...
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...
I work toward welcoming marginalized voices into my classroom while moving my students toward a stance grounded in love and freedom. As a student, I never encountered a curriculum that did that. When I first became an educator, I struggled to find examples of curricula or lessons that effectively...
The Intersection of Rhetorics and Justice: An IB unit of study
When teaching about historically marginalized and oppressed communities, that’s usually what students understand: we are in pain, in sorrow, and are oppressed. While there is accuracy to that due to systemic oppression, we often...
