Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. - Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998) When you think of a classroom, does love come to your mind? Classrooms are typically
Every day, educators strive to implement engaging and meaningful lessons that are relevant to and reflective of the lives and communities of all the students in their classrooms. We see this becoming more and more prevalent, not just in English language arts and history or
WHY? Consider how your students would answer the following questions: During math lessons, how are your ideas about math valued? How does learning math relate to the rest of your life, in and out of school? Students’ responses to these questions can help gauge the sort of
Children enter our classrooms with curiosity: they are curious about themselves, curious about the content, curious about their classmates, and curious about the world. This curiosity can extend to thinking about how students experience and understand issues of fairness, equity, power, and justice in their
Undoubtedly, all teachers enter the classroom desiring to serve their students best. The question is: what do teachers do intentionally and “on purpose” to ensure each student has “joy moments” as a regular and routine component of their daily instructional learning experience? Joy moments are
A pedagogy of compliance continues to dominate the majority of American classrooms, particularly at a secondary level, characterized by lecture-style instruction, students in rows looking toward the teacher as knowledge expert, and teachers carrying the cognitive load. This model minimizes instructional conversation between teacher and student and
Why? Whether we talk about it or not, our students regularly experience the impacts of social privilege, oppression, opportunity, power, and activism every day. Children in schools and communities are faced each day with disparities in opportunity and are often forced into systems of inequity that maintain social status quo. It is
Planet COVID-19 may be new terrain, yet, for some of us, it conjures memories, feelings, and wounds of a dark past. Dr. Fauci dominates our airwaves with increasing frequency – at once a truthteller and doomsday sayer. For those of us who survived the HIV
Not seeing racism and feeling its offense is a privilege only white people can have. When I was very young, I learned to skip rope to a simple tune my best friend taught me with the words “eenie meenie miney moe, catch a (n-word) by the toe.” Even now, every
How do we create schools that better serve all students? It’s a question on the minds of many school leaders. The challenge is that while educators may dedicate years of hard work to equity efforts, they often see little change. Why? Too often schools look