Böcker i Practitioner Inquiry Series-serien

How does practitioner inquiry impact education? Examining the experiences of practitioners who have participated in inquiry projects, the authors present ways in which this work has enabled educators to be positive change agents. They reveal the difference that practitioner inquiry has made in their professional practice, understanding of student learning, content area knowledge, and careers.

How do teachers and schools create meaningful learning experiences for students with diverse skills, abilities, and cultures? How can teachers authentically assess the learning of their students and build on their strengths and interests in ways that enrich the larger community? How can schools be turned into places where everyone is learning from each other? These are the big questions that guide the work of teachers at the well-known Mission Hill School in Boston and that are addressed in this book. Teaching in Themes will help schools incorporate a whole-school, theme-based curriculum that engages students across grade levels K8. The authors provide detailed descriptions of four thematic units: Whats Baking in Kathys Classroom?, The Impact of Nature and Play, The Struggle for Justice: U.S. History Through the Eyes of African-Americans, and Astronomical Inquiries. Readers will see how teachers and students design emergent inquiries within the themes and create artwork, music, presentations, and a variety of hands-on learning experiences that support differentiated instruction across the curriculum.

In this volume, teachers from urban, suburban, and rural districts join together in a teacher inquiry group to challenge homophobia and heterosexism in schools and classrooms. To create safe learning environments for all students they address key topics, including seizing teachable moments, organizing faculty, deciding whether to come out in the classroom, using LGBTQ-inclusive texts, running a Gay-Straight Alliance, changing district policy to protect LGBTQ teachers and students, dealing with resistant students, and preparing preservice teachers to do antihomophobia work.

Tackles the impact of race and culture on teaching and learning. This book places focus on the connections among teacher quality, teacher preparation, and the achievement gap for African Americans and other children of color. It addresses ways that teachers can assess and enhance their own racial and cultural competence.

Offers a different view of the relationship of knowledge and practice and of the role of practitioners in educational change. This book offers the notion of inquiry as stance as a challenge to various arrangements and outcomes of schools and other educational contexts.

This work is about a group of experienced K-12 teachers who took teacher research to another level. Their story is not only about teachers working together to improve their own teaching, but also about their research reverberated throughout their schools.

Challenges prevailing notions about autism by offering the viewpoint of adolescents on the spectrum through their writing, photography, poetry, art, and more. This book is a critical resource for teacher preparation and professional learning in any field that interacts with individuals with autism or other disabilities.

This groundbreaking volume encourages educational leaders to reposition the way they think about leadership and its challenges. Experienced school and district leaders reveal how they conceptualize their roles; how they learn by posing and solving problems of practice; and how they cope with increasing expectations and complexity in their work.

Honest, clearly written, and accessible this book shows how to use "Family Dialogue Journals" to increase and deepen learning among students in grades K-12. Written by teachers who have been implementing and studying the use of weekly journals, the book shares what they have learned and why they have found these journals to be an invaluable tool for forming effective partnerships with families.

Explores the opportunities and challenges that arise when White teachers are willing to deal directly with race and the role it plays in their classrooms. Based on lessons gleaned from experienced White teachers in a variety of settings, it lays out a path for using inquiry to develop sustained, productive engagement with challenging - and common - questions about race.

By carefully documenting how space was made for Jenny - a child who didn't fit the school mold - this book offers a renewed sense of human possibility and an attainable vision of what schools can be. It demonstrates that it is only by attending to each and every child that schooling can begin to achieve its most noble aim: equality.

This work introduces, through story and essay, a disciplined descriptive process for understanding children's strengths as particular learners and thinkers. The descriptive review is a method of collaborative inquiry that draws on the detailed knowledge teachers and parents have of children.