Filled with day-to-day literacy practices, this book will help elementary school teachers understand their role in dismantling the imbalance of privilege in literacy education. Chapters take readers into classrooms where they will see, hear, and feel decolonizing and humanizing culturally relevant pedagogies as students learn literacy and a critical stance through musical literacies, oral histories, heritage lessons, and building a critical consciousness. The authors also share strategies to help teachers examine their own educational spaces, start the school year in culturally relevant ways, build reciprocal relationships with families and communities, and teach within standards and testing mandates while challenging unjust systems. Practices are brought to life through students, families, and community members who voice the realities of pedagogical privilege and oppression and urge educators to take action for change. “Teachers of every child must acknowledge that ‘we’ve been doing it your way long enough’—this is the brilliance of the book and the work that lies ahead for all who commit to choosing the culturally relevant classroom.” —Valerie Kinloch, dean, University of Pittsburgh School of Education “Captures the heart of culturally relevant teaching. It is impossible to read this book and return to the same old pedagogies and practices.” —Nathaniel Bryan, Miami University “This volume seamlessly embeds guidance for creating liberating pedagogical practices in order to transform schools for all students and teachers.” —Gloria Boutte, University of South Carolina

Learning to Be Teacher Leaders examines three integrated components of strong pedagogy—assessment, planning, and instruction—within a framework emphasizing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that can empower teachers to become teacher leaders within their schools. Combining the what, why, and how of teaching, the research-based concepts, presented in a pragmatic format, are relevant across grade levels, classrooms, and content areas. Designed to support success on national licensure assessments, this text brings together in one place the important features of learning to be an effective teacher, and becoming a teacher leader who continues to grow and develop within the profession. Taking a student-centered approach to instruction, it also recognizes the outside factors that can challenge this approach and provides strategies for coping with them. Using this book as a guide and resource, pre-service and beginning teachers will focus on the most important factors in teaching, resulting in strengthening their pedagogy and developing a language that helps them move forward in terms of agency and advocacy. A Companion Website provides additional resources for instructors and students.

Addresses the challenges of meeting national accreditation requirements, including designing assessment instruments and making data-driven decisions. This book explores and shares tensions created as teacher education programs experience changes because of accountability requirements related to the accreditation process.

This book is a longitudinal study of a 10-year experimental teacher education program. Follow-up studies and writing continued for 6 years after the program closed. This case study describes a search for effective and socially just practices within a long-term reform initiative intended to prepare teachers for urban schools. The program was run through a Professional Development School--a collaboration between a university program and a diverse group of practicing teachers; and the book was written collaboratively by many of the participants—faculty, mentor teachers, doctoral students, and teacher candidates/graduates. There are few longitudinal studies of teacher education programs, especially ones that focus on what was learned and told by those who did the learning. The narratives here are rich, diverse, and multivocal. They capture the complexity of a reform initiative conducted within a democratic context. It’s difficult, messy and as varied as is democracy itself. The program was framed by a sociocultural perspective and the focus was on learning through difference. Dialogue across difference, which is more than just talk, was both the method for doing research and the means for learning. The program described here began in the ferment of teacher education reform in the early 1990s, responding to the critics of the mid-1980s; and this account of it is finished at a time when teacher education is again under attack from a different direction. Criticized earlier for being too progressive, teacher education is now seen as too conservative. The longitudinal results of this program show high retention rates and ground the argument that quality teacher preparation programs for teaching in urban schools may well be cost effective, as well as provide increased student learning. This is counter to the current move to shorten teacher preparation programs, at a time of low teacher retention in our under resourced urban schools. The book does not advocate a model for teacher education, but it aims to provide principles for practice that include school/university collaboration, democratic dialogue across differences, and inquiry as a way to guide reform.

Too often, new teachers enter the profession excited to make a difference in the lives of children only to find themselves disillusioned and overwhelmed with the expectations of the classroom. In A Sense of Belonging, Jennifer Allen shares her stories and journey in creating an infrastructure of support for new teachers within her school district. A Sense of Belonging provides research-based, practical ideas on how to support new teachers while honoring the innovation, idealism, and optimistic enthusiasm that they bring to the classroom. From supporting new teachers early in the year with administering and analyzing literacy assessments, through using student work to guide instruction, to offering ongoing help with curriculum planning, Jennifer shares strategies on:, fostering relationships with new teachers, starting before school even begins;, creating learning environments for new teachers to be reflective practitioners;, coaching new teachers in their classrooms and providing opportunities for them to observe their peers in action;, supporting new teachers beyond their first year through gradual release of support over their first several years in the classroom; and, facilitating professional development opportunities where new and veteran teachers learn alongside one another. Jennifer believes, and her book demonstrates, that when schools embrace, encourage, and celebrate the work of new teachers, they establish a supportive environment that fosters excellence and improves retention.

Parents who are also educational researchers have access to a domain that is highly complex and not always available to other scholars. In this book, parent-researchers provide theoretical and practical insights into children’s learning in the home and at school. Readers are given a window into learning in the home context and how all family members organize or engage in that learning. Working on two levels, the book develops scholarly discussions about learning in the home (how is it organized, who the participants are, and what children are learning), and it illustrates the impacts that outside institutions, in particular schools, have on families It is unique in showcasing parent-research as a type of research paradigm with particular aspects and challenges. Both teachers and researchers can learn from these studies as they show the impact that schooling has on families and how institutional discourses and beliefs can both positively and negatively affect the dynamics of any family.