The most recent 10 years of my 20-year career in education have been focused on eliminating the barriers that homelessness presents in education. When I meet with students and families, I address immediate needs, such as transportation to school and access to food, as those are pressing. But I always ask one life-affirming question before […]
Current Events in Education
Posted inConfessions of a Teacher
Healing Magic in a Hurting World: Analyzing Student and Teacher Relationships
By Emily Goldstein One of the hardest things to witness as a teacher, and even more so now that I am a parent of a two-year-old, is seeing young people have their dignity diminished, and their spirits and self-perceptions degraded by adults and teachers in the classroom. Often adults and teachers don’t even realize that […]
Posted inConfessions of a Teacher
Opinion: Not To Be Denied: I Was Denied Inclusion as a K-12 Student, Here’s How I Found My Voice
I loved everything school had to offer me until I walked through the doors of a Black-owned bookstore and discovered I had been denied. From kindergarten to college, I had been denied of who I am and who I could become. It was my last year in college when a professor from my African Thought […]
Posted inAsk a Teacher
A Teacher Lost in the Dust
I am sitting in the back of the school bus. Waves rock my body as we navigate the red sandy-washed roads. I’ve been riding in traditional yellow buses just about my whole life as a student, teacher, and chaperone. This time is different. Traditional Navajo songs echo through the bus, intermittent with the news Dine’ […]
Posted inFrom the Front Lines
Teach to the Rest: Three More Ways We Can Use the Pandemic to Transform Schools For the Better- Part 2
By Thomas Courtney Last year, I wrote about the opportunity we had to change the very way in which our schools operated. Twenty years ago, teaching to the test transformed our educational system. To many, the pandemic was simply the last piece of the puzzle that revealed the picture of what our schools had become. […]
Posted inCulturally Responsive Teaching
4 Ways to Improve your Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Studies for Elementary Learners
By Tamara V. Russell, NBCT Each year during the months of January and February, elementary school classrooms across the country whitewash the story of Dr. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. Because students are so young, many times teachers will limit the scope of the movement to the idea that Dr. King was […]
Posted inInstruction & Curriculum
How This Teacher Healed from Racial Trauma
Kim Lee is a physics teacher at Pinole Valley High School in West Contra Costa Unified School District. She has been teaching for the last four years. She is the teacher sponsor of the Anti-Racism Club and helps run the Peer Tutoring Program. She is committed to promoting diversity and equity through STEM education, as […]
Posted inAsk a Teacher
Dear First Year Teacher: This Is a Time Like No Other
It’s been nineteen years since I walked into my first classroom, but I remember it like yesterday. It was a small private school on the far south side of Chicago. The school had little money, I was the only English teacher for 9-12 grade, and my 80+ students came from a whole range of experiences and socio-economic circumstances.