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In our kindergarten classroom, there are no desks. Instead, we have three large, child-sized tables, around which 20 children and three teachers can fit. We call it the writing table. Here, students can draw, write and complete phonics-based workbooks. One morning, Greta was drawing a picture of something that had happened the day before: She and her friend Lily had made bird nests during outside recess and had placed them all throughout the yard. Greta was illustrating herself and Lily making nests. Her classmate Ellie watched her create the drawing.

This English teacher’s students engage in lots of self-reflection toward the end of the year. This year, she added in a missing element: questions about how they’ve affected each other.

When I was studying to be a teacher, I had to write a philosophy of education. This essay was to explain what I believed about kids and the role teachers and education played in their lives. I wrote that all kids could learn, that they all deserved equal access to inspired teaching and that my role was to meet them wherever they were and serve them in the way that best met their needs.Although I still believe those things are true, I've come to realize that my teaching is driven more by a different philosophy than the one I wrote about.

This educator reflects on the scariest student conversation she has overheard in her teaching career.

A student pleads with me at the beginning of class to bring an electronic reader to class? “I’m almost finished reading my book and I want to finish it, but it’s on my (electronic reader name), the students says. “Please? I’m at a really good part.” At first, this appears to be every language arts teacher’s dream; students begging to continue reading things they’ve read on their own time for fun. But, then come the problems.

In Oakland, Calif., there are a lot of homicides especially for a fairly small city of about 400,000 people. Last July, there were seven homicides in seven days. Victims ranged in age from 15 to 84. Six of them occurred near the school where I taught. One was a friend of many of my former students and a cousin of a little girl I mentor.

It was a brisk New England day as I walked out of the community center with a group of Somali Muslim women from my adult English as a Second Language class. My students were laughing and joking, their hijabs blowing in the breeze. We had finished our unit on the New World, drawing connections between Europeans immigrating to America and Somalis immigrating to Lewiston and southern Maine. Suddenly, a local woman shouted, "Terrorists!"

In order to enhance my sixth-graders’ ability to connect personally with topics we read about in class, I assigned a writing assignment. I ask students to make real connections to demonstrate their understanding of the topic. There are three areas of connection. First there’s the connection to their lives, then to another piece of literature and finally—the most sophisticated connection—to the world.