Teaching Outside the Box but Inside the Standards

Many educators feel caught between mandates to meet literacy standards and the desire to respond to individual students’ interests, skills, and challenges. This book demonstrates how a dialogical approach to practice will enable teachers to meet the needs of today’s diverse student population within a standardized curriculum. Chapters highlight the efforts of four high school teachers to create dialogical classroom space, documenting both the possibilities of and impediments to such an approach to teaching. Drawing on a theoretical framework and rationale for engaged dialogical practice, the authors present and analyze key classroom events that illustrate the productive and restrictive tensions for such work and suggest ways for teachers and schools to implement these ideas, especially for complementing and expanding the Common Core State Standards.

Book Features:

• Examples of teachers using dialogue to engage students, as well as colleagues, administrators, parents, policymakers, and other educational stakeholders.
• Guidance for teachers in how to differentiate instruction to meet literacy standards.
• Case studies illustrating how teachers navigate the tension between standardization and student-centered teaching.
• An exemplary collaborative effort among a university researcher, doctoral students, and high school teachers.
• The reflections and self-questioning of teachers who write honestly, engagingly, and insightfully about their dialogical practices.

Bob Fecho is professor of English education at Teachers College, Columbia University and founding director of the Red Clay Writing Project at the University of Georgia. His books include Teaching for the Students: Habits of Heart, Mind, and Practice in the Engaged Classroom and “Is This English?”: Race, Language, and Culture in the Classroom, which received the James N. Britton award, CEE/NCTE. Michelle Falter and Xiaoli Hong are doctoral candidates at the University of Georgia in the Department of Language and Literacy Education.

"In an accessible and thought-provoking narrative, these four teacher-researchers and the three teacher educators present an alternative view into the complexity of the classroom."

—From the Foreword by Meenoo Rami, educator and author of Thrive: 5 Ways to (Re)Invigorate Your Teaching

" Teaching Outside the Box but Inside the Standards is rigorous though poetic, filled with theory and science, but not in the ways we’ve come to know them. The science and theory of teaching are shaped in the core of story, sketched in lessons well learned. Moreover, each story is offered as an invitation to reach beyond the moment while courageously teaching within it."

—David E. Kirkland, director, NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools, New York University

"Fecho, Falter, and Hong have given Teacher Education, and English Education in particular, a true gift in this text. In their edited volume, a chorus of teachers demonstrate how they use their curricular powers to provide opportunities for students to experience 'engaged dialogical practice' as teachers attend to the nuances of the Common Core Standards. By encouraging educators to embrace the 'wobble'—that is, the tensions teachers often feel when their teaching and student learning are gaining momentum—this book is both a mirror and a window for advancing the use of dialogue in compelling ways in the classroom."

—Maisha Winn, Susan J. Cellmer Endowed Chair in English Education; professor in Language and Literacy in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison