The handbook for improving morale by managing, disciplining and motivating your students This second edition of the bestselling book includes practical suggestions for arranging your classroom, talking to students, avoiding the misbehavior cycle, and making your school a place where students learn and teachers teach. The book also contains enlivening Q&A from teachers, letters from students, and tips for grading. This new edition has been expanded to include coverage of the following topics: discipline, portfolio assessments, and technology in the classroom. Includes engaging questions for reflection at the end of each chapter Johnson is the author of The New York Times bestseller Dangerous Minds (originally My Posse Don't Do Homework) Contains a wealth of practical tools that support stellar classroom instruction This thoroughly revised and updated edition contains comprehensive advice for both new and experienced teachers on classroom management, discipline, motivation, and morale.

In its totality, this book explores subjects that are rarely available in primary literature publications and brings diverging fields together that are generally addressed separately in specialty journals. The book argues that past school failures are instructive. The author identifies the structural and emotional triggers that make it difficult for educators’ to overcome the social constructs that control the progress of Black students, reproduce inequities, subvert the socio-economic progress of the nation, and threaten the legitimacy of the U.S. public school system. One failure is informative; successive school failures are chock-full of must avoid school policies and instructional practices. The book analyzes the lessons learned from a list of school-imposed policies that have molded and determined the academic progress of Black students. The author argues that much can be discerned from that which undermined the performance of schoolteachers’ and public school systems. The quantifiable outcomes of past school practices can better inform educators and future teachers and school leaders. The book carefully analyzes the organic evolution of educators’ social constructs that regenerated inequities to reveal the road map for rebuilding genuinely inclusive and equitable public school systems that serve the interests of students and society. The book also provides in-depth analysis of various disciplines that identify the best methodologies to improve the teaching and learning of Black students, homeless students, and all other students. The book aims to offer a unique perspective by carefully unfolding the built in school structures that obstruct the abilities of school administrators and teachers to bridge the student achievement gaps and meet the objectives of consecutive school reform initiatives. The author’s distinctive approach stimulates the thinking of the entire field of education, and challenges accepted propositions commonly assumed about African American students. In short, this book offers a perspective that is rarely shared or understood by educators and practitioners in the field of education.

Many educators feel caught between mandates to meet literacy standards and the desire to respond to individual students’ interests, skills, and challenges. This book illustrates how a dialogical approach to practice will enable teachers to meet the needs of today’s diverse student population within a standardized curriculum. Chapters highlight the efforts of four high school teachers to create dialogical classroom space, documenting both the possibilities of and impediments to such an approach to teaching. Drawing on a theoretical framework and rationale for engaged dialogical practice, the authors present and analyze key classroom events that illustrate the productive and restrictive tensions for such work and suggest ways for teachers and schools to implement these ideas, especially for complementing and expanding the Common Core State Standards. Book Features: Examples of teachers using dialogue to engage students, as well as colleagues, administrators, parents, policymakers, and other educational stakeholders.Guidance for teachers in how to differentiate instruction to meet literacy standards.Case studies illustrating how teachers navigate the tension between standardization and student-centered teaching.An exemplary collaborative effort among a university researcher, doctoral students, and high school teachers.The reflections and self-questioning of teachers who write honestly, engagingly, and insightfully about their dialogical practices.

Rather than tweaking the ways youth ministers communicate the gospel, Teaching Outside the Box, explores five distinct approaches to forming youth in the faith—approaches that open youth to experiencing the implications of the gospel in new ways. We’ll start by providing a new take on the instructional approach, and then introduce four additional approaches that are likely new to readers: community of faith, interpretive, liberation, and contemplative.

This essential resource helps new teachers survive and thrive in the classroom with proven tips on classroom management, teacher-student relationships, and coping with professional challenges.

Highlights of the book: Explores and expands opportunities for engaging student conversation and ideas Adds variety and depth to your teaching methods Hone questioning and critical thinking skills Move from lower to higher levels Reinvent instruction at home, work, or in classrooms as places of imagination and enjoyment

Everyone knows that educational success is much more likely when students’ imaginations and emotions are caught up in learning. While we have a rich educational literature about holding students’ interest, we do not have very much sustained work on what the imagination is, how it works in learning, or how it may be inspired in the classroom. Addressing the whole curriculum, this book provides insights into each of those areas central to educational success. Engaging the imagination is sometimes seen in opposition to preparing students for testing, but scoring well on tests and being imaginatively active in learning are not mutually exclusive. When students’ imaginations are engaged in learning their educational performance will improve by any test or measure. This book offers a new understanding of how knowledge grows in the mind and how our imagination works and changes during our lifetime. Knowledgeable authors describe innovative teaching methods based on these insights, which offer new ways of planning and teaching.

Drawing on Dialogical Self Theory, this book presents a new framework for social and cultural identity construction in the literacy classroom, offering possibilities for how teachers might adjust their pedagogy to better support the range of cultural stances present in all classrooms. In the complex multicultural/multiethnic/multilingual contexts of learning in and out of school spaces today, students and teachers are constantly dialoguing across cultures, both internally and externally, and these cultures are in dialogue with each other. The authors unpack some of the complexity of culture and identity, what people do with culture and identity, and how people navigate multiple cultures and identities. Readers are invited to re-examine how they view different cultures and the roles these play in their lives, and to dialogue with the authors about cultures, learning, literacy, identity, and agency.