At the Heart of Teaching

Featuring engaging narratives, this “how-to” book delves into reflection as a concept and provides specific, replicable tools for professional practice. Each chapter draws on a particular school situation demonstrating the value of teacher reflection and describing the nuts and bolts of the process, including protocols for handling many different circumstances.

Written by public school teachers who offer lessons learned and strategies that work, this volume:

• Provides insights to help teachers build reflective practice with their students, including protocols for classroom problem solving.
• Presents scenarios for individual students, their parents, and teachers to talk together about a student’s performance, including protocols for conducting family meetings.
• Shows what can happen when teachers come together to share stories of their daily lives, including protocols for conducting a focus group.
• Offers advice for reflecting alone and with a group, including protocols for both types of reflection.
• Tells stories of parents, a university supervisor, a district administrator, and a policymaker engaged in the process of reflection, including protocols for collaborative assessment.

Grace Hall McEntee is a retired public high school teacher, co-founder and editor of the AISR Writing Within School Reform Publication Series, and co-founder of Educators Writing for Change. Jon Appleby teaches English at Noble High School in North Berwick, Maine. JoAnne Dowd is the curriculum coordinator for School Administrative Unit 21 in Hampton, New Hampshire, and is a national NSRF facilitator. Jan Grant is the founder and director of Forum and Associates, a consulting firm in Kingston, Rhode Island, dedicated to educational reform initiatives. Simon Hole teaches fourth grade in Narragansett, Rhode Island. Peggy Silva is co-author of Standards of Mind and Heart: Creating the Good High School and writing coordinator at Souhegan High School in Amherst, New Hampshire.

“At the end of each chapter I was dying to go back to the classroom and adapt a new idea into my practice. But probably more importantly, I saw my own practice in a new light as I read these engaging accounts of the work of other teachers. They ring true and honest to what schooling is about and how and why good teachers never give up—and why they love their work.”
— Deborah Meier, Co-principal of Mission Hill School and author of In Schools We Trust

“Typical professional development fare will rarely take us close to the particulars of our own practice….As I read through these chapters, finally, it’s that sense of thoughtful becoming, that possibility of action in the midst of uncertainty that, at the end of the day, is the promise of this book.”
—From the Foreword by Mike Rose