I have found that before people can accept and value diversity in others, they need to first see similarities. Teachers and students need to learn more than each others’ names; it vital that they learn about each other, who they are. It is important that teachers help students to forge new friendships, for each class to form an “Us,” rather than and “Us” and “Them.”
Originally published on January 24, 2016, Ethical ELA is re-posting “Building Community” by Lesley Roessing as a call to all teachers to make building community a priority in the first weeks of your school year and to nurture community every step of the way. _____________________________________________________________________________ …
As a teacher, I found myself stopping and wondering: Do I often only hear babbling where there is, in fact, poetry? How do my assumptions and expectations for student writing and communication block a student’s ability to communicate? Do my expectations work against my intentions?
Originally published September 7, 2015. Lesley Roessing has been an invaluable resource for Ethical ELA, and her contributions on the Facebook page Teaching Teens and its book groups are just priceless. Thank you, Lesley. ____________________________________________________________ In Losing the Fear of Sharing Control: Starting a Reading Workshop, Lesley …
National Poetry Month comes around every April, and it is a time to remember and to celebrate poetry as writers, as readers, as human beings. Most ELA teachers know that reading poems and writing poems go hand in hand. Still, not everyone has uncovered and …
From Train Wreck to Triumph! My Experience Teaching ELL Students in a General Education Classroom….We. Can. Do. It. by Sarah Dollah-Said I have been a teacher for over a decade now. I’m totally aging myself, but in that decade I have seen trends in education go …
An interview about at the ideas that started Ethical ELA.
Teachers often try to hook students by finding books that “they can relate to” and what that usually translates to is books that deal with the same issues or kinds of people that teenagers encounter in their daily lives. But I often try to search out books that kids can’t relate to, at least not entirely. I want to expose them to lives that are nothing like theirs.
by Cameron Gale Huck Finn was going the way of Hester Prynne in my American Heritage classroom. Which is to say, he was getting chipped and chopped into smaller and smaller segments that I could spoon-feed to my students. Gone were the first eight, then …
Why encourage students to read comics in English class? Because reading comics is reading. Because comics are art. Because comics examine humanity and what it means to be vulnerable. Lifetime comic lover Paul Brzegowy talks about the story and art of comics.