Reflecting & Storytelling About Teaching
Writing a book about teaching is not as hard as it seems. You don’t need an agent, and cold submissions can be very successful. In 2007, I had been teaching for almost a decade, always fascinated by curriculum design… Continue reading
Writing a letter to a politician is about as “civic” an assignment as we can do within our classroom walls, and it feels especially relevant in our polarized political climate. For the first two years that my U.S. history and civics students wrote these letters, though, I didn’t quite… Continue reading
I’m an annotation geek, and my students know it. Whether in English or history, I’m that teacher: the one who asks students to interact constantly with the text as they read. This could be in the margins if they’re looking at a handout… 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
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
Right now I’m barreling into the year with a project I’m beyond excited about. It asks students to choose a current issue in the news and then write and film their own spoken word poem about it. This spoken word poetry project feels unusual (okay, scary) to me in a number of ways… Continue reading
For adults who love history, the spark of the past arrives not in packaged textbook bites but in zingers that we can’t forget. We see a historical reference in the newspaper and can’t wait to share it with our breakfast table companions – children, partners, dogs, cats… Continue reading
