Educational insights for teachers, school leaders, and more.
Many White teachers, like us, enter the field enamored of characters like Huck for what they allow us to feel as White people, especially in relation to people of color: heroic, on the right side of history, doing our part to combat racism through our teaching of literature. This is partly why so many of us reach for a text like Huckleberry Finn when we think about how it is that we (think) we address racism through our literature instruction. It feels good to “join” Huck in his decision to help Jim. And pointing out this decision through our teaching feels like we are doing work towards antiracist ends.
In most Western European nations (with a few exceptions, such as the U.K.), children learn to read at the age of 6. Even in the U.S., the practice of teaching children to decode words at age 5 is fairly recent. Teaching reading in kindergarten became popular with the rise of standardized testing. This was based on the assumption that early reading would give children a head start, allowing them to do better on the standardized tests they would take in the upper elementary grades. Did the strategy work?
Throughout history, our leaders and icons have emphasized the importance of civic action. However, civic education is often ignored in the American public school system. In his latest book, Teaching History, Learning Citizenship, Jeffery Nokes promotes history instruction that nurtures knowledge, skills, and dispositions as tools for civic engagement.
Below, we’re sharing an excerpt from Keith Sawyer’s latest book, The Creative Classroom. This excerpt highlights strategies for teachers to incorporate creative knowledge strategies when teaching math and science.
Professional development should be done by teachers, not done to them. It works best when it comes from the inside out, not from the top down. This idea is not new, and it is well-supported in research. However, teachers’ professional development is often provided, rather than supported. Why is this?
As writing teachers, our fundamental pedagogical goal is to facilitate our students’ abilities to develop their voices through writing. We are keenly aware of this goal with our education students, who come to our Writing in Education courses often underestimating the amount, and importance, of writing they will produce as teachers
