"Teaching Toward a Decolonizing Pedagogy" outlines educational practitioner development toward decolonizing practices and pedagogies for anti-racist, justice-based urban classrooms. Through rich personal narratives of one teacher's critical reflections on her teaching, urban education scholarship and critical praxis are merged to provide…

In her new book, bestselling author Cynthia Ballenger explores the intellectual strengths of students that teachers find "puzzling"--poor, urban, immigrant, or bilingual children who do not traditionally excel in school. Ballenger challenges the assumption that these children--whose families in many cases have less formal education, read fewer…

This cutting-edge guide presents multiple approaches to teaching poetry at the middle and high school levels. The author provides field-tested activities with detailed how-to instructions, as well as advice for how educators can "justify" their teaching within a high-stakes curriculum environment. "Let's Poem" will show pre- and inservice teachers…

Developed by educators in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, public schools, this book shows ways to engage students in high quality work, reveal information about students that cannot be seen through standardized tests, and help students become responsible for their own academic growth. The Assessment Portfolios described are used in 21 Milwaukee schools…

Offering suggestions on setting up and maintaining a cross-age reading program, this book describes teachers' experiences in establishing a cross-age reading program in a multiethnic, multilingual inner-city school in Oakland, California. The book notes that what began as an effort to engage one under-achieving fifth-grade boy evolved into an…

The change needed in urban music education not only relates to the idea that music should be at the center of the curriculum; rather, it is that culturally relevant music should be a creative force at the center of reform in urban education. Teaching Music in the Urban Classroom: A Guide to Survival, Success, and Reform is the start of a…

Replete with lessons for educators, this book reports in a personal way on a middle school classroom study undertaken by a teacher researcher that was to last 1 year but ended up lasting 6 years. The book contains the social and cultural forces that influence adolescents' literacy development--for instance, taking a hard look at the race and…

This book focuses on research conducted in the last 20 years that shows what urban teachers can do to add new knowledge and skills to their repertoire of teaching so that students can increase their own achievement. Dedicated to the idea that all children can learn, it provides hundreds of practical educational strategies. Some approaches that are…

Most people think of nature in the city as parks and zoos and dandelions pushing up through cracks in the sidewalk, but it is also asphalt streets, granite office buildings and mazes of underground pipes and cables. The materials of which the streets and buildings are constructed began as prehistoric jungles and ancient mountains. The systems that…

For African Americans, school is often not a place to learn but a place of low expectations and failure. In urban schools with concentrations of poverty, often fewer than half the ninth graders leave with a high school diploma. In this book, Black and White teachers provide an insightful approach to inclusive and equitable teaching and illustrate…