Reflecting & Storytelling About Teaching
When I walked into a one-hour session at the most recent National Council for the Social Studies annual conference – a mega-gathering with ideas and fellow teachers spilling from every corner, not to mention a celebrity sighting of Constitution USA guru Peter Sagal – I didn’t expect to walk out ready to transform… Continue reading
Why do we want to make our students into historians? Not because even a fraction of a percent of them might become writers or professors – but because “doing history” teaches life skills hard to learn… Continue reading
Linda Christensen and Dyan Watson’s Rhythm and Resistance: Teaching Poetry for Social Justice had me at its title, which promises the perfect blend of art and activism. After I read the introduction to the first chapter, I realized this book might promise even more than that… Continue reading
Assigning opinion pieces on current issues gives our students voice and lets us hear their strong and sometimes fiery perspectives. When I’ve assigned op-eds in both world and U.S. history, students have responded best when… Continue reading
Sometimes it’s the simplest tweaks that make a project pop – and this one turned out to be even simpler and more effective than I had envisioned. Eighth graders at my school do an individual or partnered community impact project each year… Continue reading
A recent one-day professional growth workshop epitomized what I hope students will take away from my classes: a sense that their well-informed communication can change the world. The event, Poetic Convergence, was on a Saturday, and it took more than an hour… Continue reading
Why did I worry? In my last blog post, I wrote about my fears surrounding a new project. My eighth-grade U.S. history students had chosen an issue they cared about in the news, and they were about to write and film spoken word poems about it. I was nervous, and… Continue reading
