Reflective Teaching

"I just don’t know what to do about Jordan," confessed Mary, whom I’d just met. I don’t know if she was confiding in me because I teach English or because that’s just what one does at a nail salon. “Last year, he spent hours filling his journals and talking about being a writer when he grew up. Now he hardly writes at all. He says he’s not any good at it.”  

As a student teacher, my mentor Paula told me that the best teachers were lifelong learners. Following her own wisdom, she took fiddle lessons every week. She practiced daily. Be a student—of anything—she said. That way you'll always empathize with those you are trying to teach.

For the last three days, I've been learning complex choreographed dances right along with my students. I am being schooled in my mentor's lesson and in dance.

The oak tree where nooses were hung at the Jena High School campus in the Fall of 2006 no longer stands. It was chopped down, presumably in an effort to erase racial tension in the small Louisiana town of Jena.

Psychologists at Harvard, the University of Virginia and the University of Washington created "Project Implicit" to develop Hidden Bias Tests — called Implicit Association Tests, or IATs, in the academic world — to measure unconscious bias.

A bias incident is conduct, speech or expression motivated, in whole or in part, by bias or prejudice.

Is your classroom a calm, relaxing day or a violent, destructive storm? Is it sunny, cloudy or rainy? Is it frigidly cold? Are you a calm, refreshing breeze or a tornado?

This professional development activity examines common beliefs that help and hinder work with racially and ethnically diverse students.

A biography study of "Great Peacemakers of the World"

Educators today hear a lot about gaps in education – achievement gaps, funding gaps, school-readiness gaps. Still, there's another gap that often goes unexamined: the cultural gap between students and teachers.

A Conversation with Rebecca Puhl

Teaching Tolerance offers tools to help teachers and students get through the grueling and seemingly unrewarding weeks of mandated testing.

Subtle changes in test environments can improve standardized test scores among students of color and girls.

What does "white anti-racist" mean? How can guilt get in the way? And what's all this talk about being "colorblind"? Teaching Tolerance asked community activists to share their thoughts on these questions, and others. Their answers shine light on the concepts of comfort, power, privilege and identity.

In this special Q & A, educators Louise Derman-Sparks and Patricia G. Ramsey, authors of the book, What If All the Kids are White?, provide early grades educators with practical ideas on preparing white students for a multicultural world.

Students learn the importance of being an ally through the story of Juliette Hampton Morgan, a white woman who lived in Montgomery, Alabama, during segregation.

Read the foreword to Starting Small, a training tool for early grades educators available from Teaching Tolerance.

This activity helps students understand the injustice and dangers of scapegoating an entire group of people during a national crisis.

Tad Thomas of the Positive Youth Foundation offers simple tips for starting an activist club at school.

Here are five things you can do to make your classroom respectful and culturally sensitive.

Two experts offer opinions on what to expect from the economic crisis - and how to help your students cope.

A look at an educator's struggle to reconcile ideology with reality in our nations' classrooms and schools.