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This volume represents the first effort to present, and teach, the descriptive processes, philosophy, and values developed at the Prospect Archives and Center for Education and Research in North Bennington, Vermont. Through story and essay, it introduces a disciplined, collaborative method for understanding children as thinkers and learners called the descriptive review of the child. Developed through the Prospect Center, under the leadership of Patricia F. Carini, the descriptive review is a mode of inquiry that draws on the rich, detailed knowledge teachers and parents have of children and on their ability to describe those children in full and balanced ways, so that they become visible as complex persons with particular strengths, interests, and capacities. In an educational climate that calls increasingly for standardization, this book is a timely resource for educators, parents, and administrators who value individual human capacity.
The student projects presented in this book demonstrate a powerful approach to teaching writing, one that requires no special equipment or resources and can be adapted for students of any age. The key is getting students involved in action research and in writing about issues that are important to them and their communities. Written by public school teachers, these chapters describe projects covering a variety of issues, including avoiding teenage health risks, preserving oral histories, fighting racism, investigating environmental hazards, decreasing instances of teen pregnancy, and much more. Based on a process-model of writing instruction, these projects will show teachers how to engage their students while also teaching the basic skills that appear in educational standards and assessment frameworks.
For first-year teachers entering the nation's urban schools, the task of establishing a strong and successful practice is often extremely challenging. In this compelling look at first-year teachers' practice in urban schools, editors Jabari Mahiri and Sarah Warshauer Freedman demonstrate how a program of systematic classroom research by teachers themselves enables them to effectively target instruction and improve their own practice. The book organizes the teachers' research into three broad areas, corresponding to issues the new teachers identified as the most challenging. The First Year of Teaching offers an array of classroom scenarios that will spark in-depth discussions in teacher preparation classes and professional devleopment workshops, particulalry in the context of problem-based, problem-posing pedagogies.
Here, a national team of teacher researchers address the difficult issues of race and ethnicity in the classroom. Experienced English and social studies teachers from four multicultural settings -- Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco -- grapple with how best to meet the literacy learning needs of an increasingly diverse school population. They deal with a variety of real issues within a culturally responsive framework, such as: -- Confronting issues of race and ethnicity in literature, within classrooms, and in a larger community -- Helping students deal with neighborhood violence and conditions of poverty -- Designing a multicultural curriculum -- Creating an emotionally safe classroom -- Fostering peer relations among faculty members.
This dynamic text offers a rare glimpse into the literacy development of urban children and their families' role in it. Based on the author's candid interviews with her first-grade students, their parents and grandparents, this book challenges the stereotypical view that urban parents don't care about their children's education. By listening closely to the voices of her students and their families, the author helps us to move beyond negative assumptions, revealing complexities that have previously been undocumented.
"This book will demonstrate that when leaders pose previously unnamed problems, and find ways to bring together working groups of students, principals, central office administrators, school faculties, parents, and/or members of the community for joint inquiry, it is more likely that new, effective solutions can be found through participatory processes of rethinking educational practices, categories, policies, and expectations. The argument is that when school, district, and other educational leaders position themselves as inquirers, their leadership can illuminate and improve many aspects of institutional life and create intellectually demanding and rich learning environments - for both adults and children"--
Featuring lively essays from rural elementary and secondary teachers, this volume describes the theory and practice of place-conscious education--using one's local place to build real, lasting connections to learning. The teachers describe the development and implementation of rich classroom writing programs that link learners with their rural communities and can serve as models for both public engagement and pedagogy. The outgrowth of research lead by the National Writing Project and funded in part by the Annenberg Rural Challenge, this book: - Applies place-conscious ideas to rural and regional contexts, rather than to urban communities in crisis.- Shows how to integrate place-conscious teaching into student-centered workshop teaching.- Describes a community writing project that attempted to save a school in the face of economic worries.- Details a Rural Institute program that guides teachers in implementing place-conscious education in their setting.- Includes an introduction by Robert Brooke and an afterword by Marian Matthews that position the work in relation to national trends in rural education.
This book offers an engaging and effective approach to improving teacher and student learning. Based on the experiences of three leading educational organizations, the authors provide invaluable, research-based guidelines for incorporating inquiry into teacher's instructional practices and student work as part of the ongoing work of schools. In addition to discussing the lessons learned and questions raised by inquiry work, this volume includes specific considerations for determining who should be involved, what work should be under review, how it should be reviewed, and how such inquiry should be supported by the school.
This book details the story of two teacher-researchers--Jennifer, who is African American, and Karen, who is White--as they set out on a collaborative three year study to explore the impact of racial and cultural differences in Karen's urban middle school classroom. They describe how they learn to confront and deal with the challenges they face so that they can work together. Their study presents the difficulties and importance of collaborations between teachers from different racial and cultural backgrounds as well as insights on how race and culture evolve in teacher-student interactions.
This book is about a group of experienced K-12 teachers who took teacher research to another level. Their story is not only about teacher working together to improve their own teaching, but also about how their research reverberated throughout their school system and inflluenced how their schools were run.