What are your students' dreams? What classroom strategies can you employ to make those dreams a reality? What attitudes and assumptions do you hold that may hinder your students from reaching their goals?
The moral imperative of teaching in the twenty-first century is ensuring that each student is prepared for college, work, and citizenship. With the high-stakes environment educators are mired in today, sometimes it's hard to translate college readiness and equitable outcomes into tangible classroom practice.
The teachers in this video will help you and your colleagues uncover the benefit of having the hard conversations together and give you the confidence to examine your individual instructional practices, as well as your school's collective cultural practices.
We'll visit a diverse classroom in Everett, Washington, where a veteran teacher has turned his Advanced Placement curriculum (open to all) into an opportunity for his students to discover their passions and apply them not only to literature, but to their futures. We'll also see how the principal utilizes opportunities provided by his school's reform effort to engage in daring conversations with other educators from across the state, in an effort to lead for equity.
Then we will travel to Boston to check out how the staff of one small school puts equity on the agenda, grappling with questions of race and class, and witness the impact these conversations have had on one teacher. She developed a project for her geometry class that strengthens students' relationships to their community, to one another, and to their teacher, all while meeting stringent mathematics standards.
See Teaching for Equity in Action!
Copies of this video and other Small Schools Project resources can be ordered using our Publications Order Form.
You may also be interested in checking out additional resources on equity from our website.
Download "Teaching for Equity: All Means All" Support Materials