TT Educator Grants support social justice work at the classroom, school and district levels. Grants Manager Jey Ehrenhalt spoke with Chris Dolgos about his project investigating the equity of urban renewal.
Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) is a staple of many classrooms. At my school it lives in Advisory, a 50-minute mixed-grade class that balances literacy development with study hall and school-culture building. The goal of SSR is simple: For 30 minutes twice a week the entire school population is reading silently—and enjoying it.
I broke a toe recently. Woke from a deep sleep, ambled around my apartment for just a few moments and then thump! I hit my foot on a piece of furniture. As I hobbled around in the days that followed, lost in the effort of just getting about, I thought “this is what it must feel like to be old.” And then—“this is what it feels like to have a disability.”
This cartoon shows a legislator who voted against marriage equality as part of a series of legislators photographed for a “wrong-side-of-history photo shoot.”
In my eighth-grade language arts classroom, we use discussion as a vehicle for learning, thinking, writing, posing and defending arguments, questioning and reviewing—just about everything. And as can be expected, we sometimes digress from the topic at hand.
We must teach conflict resolution, empathy and individual responsibility to students as deliberately as we teach math and science. Schools will not get better until we do.