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As a child I asked my father whether there was someone like Martin Luther King Jr. who had fought for Latino rights. “Yes,” he said, and told me that his name was César Chávez. My father, a former farmworker who had toiled in the agricultural fields from childhood until adulthood, taught me about César Chávez, Dolores Huerta and the farmworker struggle.

Field trips can be a great opportunity to take critical literacy to a new level. This toolkit will help you prepare your students to take on social justice issues on trips.

During my first year as a second-grade teacher, I struggled with classroom management. I am a soft-spoken person by nature and habit. I didn't have the experience to help me set up great rules and procedures for my students. My classroom was noisy and chaotic. I think you could hear us all around the school.

Using activist memoirs can help students understand how people effected change in the past—and how young people can effect change now.

One of my fondest and most salient memories from the past school year happened toward the beginning of the year. Joe had just turned 5. He was making his own book about pirates.

Educators often have a hard time getting real about race. This toolkit for "Excerpt: Getting Real About Race" provides questions to guide reflection and discussion on how the physical, social, legal and historical constructions of race impact students and educators.

Katie is the student I imagined all my students would be like when I first started teaching. In my fantasy, all my students were motivated, conscientious and ready to independently tackle any challenge I proposed. In this same fantasy, I was not the wild-haired, one-legged juggler I’ve become, but rather a calm force of wisdom and benevolence.

Hands jut into the crisp autumn air, restricting my field of vision to a sea of shirtsleeves. While this is not an odd phenomenon after a new writing assignment, the types of questions are. “When will we mail it?” and “Can I make this longer than three paragraphs?” replace heavy sighs of “When is this due, again?”

Technology is appealing to most students, but virtual learning presents advantages and disadvantages when we have equity in mind. Get your students thinking about what a virtual education really means.

As Neal A. Lester reminds us in “ Straight Talk About the N-word,” the term is one of the most loaded words in the English language. Is there ever a place for the n-word?