Teaching the Reconstruction Revolution
A high school social studies teacher describes a lesson that uses improvisations, historical fiction, and found poems to help students appreciate the first era of Black power: Reconstruction.
Middle School
It’s a Big Fat Deal
A special education teacher tackles fatphobia in our schools head-on, pointing out how we fall far short in our efforts to rid it from the classroom and how fundamentally detrimental fatphobia is to teaching and learning.
Compassion, Solidarity, Care: Detroit-Area Youth Respond to the Pandemic
Just as workers are going to need unions, young people need to be organizing as students to make collective demands on the system as well as to meet their needs in an emergency.
To the Past, with Love
The letters are sweet and encouraging — had they been delivered, they could have changed their recipients’ lives.
Coming Home to Ourselves
In her new book, The Spirit of Our Work: Black Women Teachers (Re)member, Cynthia Dillard (now dean of the College of Education at Seattle University) provides language for what occurs when Black women teachers discover their spiritual wisdom and identities that are part of a long historical continuum of Black women’s resistance, creativity, and ultimately, their healing.
Planning to Change the World 2022-2023
This is a plan book for school-based, home-based, and community-based educators who believe that young people can, will, and already do change the world. It is designed to help educators translate their vision […]
Expanding Intersectional Queer History in the Elementary Grades
A 5th- and 6th-grade teacher asks her students to wrestle with what “identity” and “intersectionality” mean.
As She Rises
I recently stumbled across a podcast that made a wonderful addition to my students’ study of the climate crisis — As She Rises.
Poetic Pauses During the Pandemic
Christensen describes how poetry can be used in this moment to be something concrete — that can be felt, touched, or smelled — but also something to stir our students’ imaginations, allowing them to dream.
“I Saw Eyes Begin to Widen”
Role plays can offer students engaging ways to learn, but require careful contextualization and follow-up. This article offers some cautions and guidance about using them.
Helping Young People Imagine a Future of Climate Solidarity
We need more books that celebrate young people who find themselves as they come to consciousness and commitment.
“Take These Nametags Off!”
A doctoral student tells the story of her experience with a dangerous role play — poorly conceptualized and taught — when she was an undergrad.
Sin Fronteras
Alexander and their middle school students use the powerful poem “To live in the borderlands means you,” by Gloria Anzaldúa, to explore the borderlands of their own lives.
Teaching the Green New Deal: The Prequel
In an article introducing the student-friendly short video, A Message from the Future, about life after the Green New Deal, Naomi Klein points out: Almost every vision of the future […]
The Teaching for Black Lives Starter Pack
Get the free Teaching for Black Lives Starter Pack when you sign up today for email updates from Rethinking Schools.
Who Cares About Classroom Norms?
A school teacher and his students radically reimagine classroom “norms” by focusing on needs-based reflections.
Reparations Can Be Won — and Must Be Taught
The story of how activists, teachers, and, organizers won mandatory curriculum in the Chicago Public Schools for 8th and 10th grades about one the darkest chapters in the city’s history — the widespread torture of Black men under Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge.
Who’s to Blame?
A middle school teacher organizes a tribunal for her students on responsibility for the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. Among those on trial are Mother Nature, Gen Z/Millennials, the Healthcare Industry, Racism and White Supremacy, the Chinese Government, the U.S. Government, and the Capitalist System.
Teach the Struggle for Voting Rights
Let’s bring the election of 2020 into our classrooms and help our students learn about democracy — and those who would subvert it.
New Online Workshop Series from Rethinking Schools
Join The New Teacher Book editors, authors, and early career teacher-scholars who wrote and shaped this book. Sign up for the entire workshop series or sign up for one workshop at a time.
We Need to Ask Our Students to Dream — and to Dream Big
Back in the 1980s, I taught an elective class at Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, called Literature and Social Change. It centered around the questions “What is a good […]
Plotting Inequalities, Building Resistance
Media depictions of San Francisco show idyllic images of fog pouring under the Golden Gate Bridge or happy tourists riding cable cars, but rarely the mostly nonwhite neighborhoods of the […]
Ordinary Heroes
A review of The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter (Harcourt, 2004)
Stop the School-to-Prison Pipeline
“Every man in my family has been locked up. Most days I feel like it doesn’t matter what I do, how hard I try—that’s my fate, too.”—11th-grade African American student, […]
The Classroom to Prison Pipeline
A master teacher faces a classroom revolt. She realizes that, no matter how imminent the high-stakes test, stopping the school-to-prison pipeline begins in the classroom with student-centered, meaningful curriculum.