Curriculum reforms often fail because teachers are asked to implement approaches to teaching and learning that are contrary to their beliefs about students and how to teach them. Since curriculum reforms are attempts to resolve particular educational problems, failures in implementation produce parallel failures to resolve the problem for which…

This article shares how the authors' experience with a graduate course led to creating the Living Museum: Empires Project with a group of local high school students enrolled in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics magnet school's combined advanced language and world issues course. The authors begin with a brief background on how…

Principal Harris, a new Black male principal at Merion High School, has found himself under fire for allegedly promoting critical race theory (CRT). He has received several forms of pushback as he navigates district and state mandates, racial trauma, invisible taxes, and microaggressions. Unfortunately, his best intentions are not good enough.…

Background/Context: Leah Boveda, a sophomore at Brown University, collaborated with her mother--Mildred Boveda, an intersectional studies scholar situated in special education and teacher education--to make sense of her high school community activism in Arizona. They retrace how Leah's experiences eventually shaped her understandings of and…

This conceptual article critiques a popular account of education grounded in Bourdieu's social theories. Specifically, the article shows how Bourdieu overplays competition and underplays ethics, or people's diverse ways of imagining, debating, and living out the good. On a Bourdieusian view of education, it is difficult to see how educators and…

Gaming the system, a behavior in which learners exploit a system's properties to make progress while avoiding learning, has frequently been shown to be associated with lower learning. However, when we applied a previously validated gaming detector across conditions in experiments with an algebra tutor, the detected gaming was not associated with…

Eradicating systemic racism in our schools requires a systemic response. This book describes an adaptive framework that includes ten tenets for developing structural and curricular antiracist leadership. In three parts, school leaders are asked to: Know Themselves through self-reflection and racial autobiography; Distinguish Knowledge From…

An introduction to the noble gases and chemical bonding via Lewis theory and the octet rule are common inclusions in secondary school curricula. However, the usual approach may lead to misconceptions and difficulties when valence bond (VB) theory and valence shell electron pair repulsion (VSEPR) theory are taught at a later pre-university stage.…

Students often have limited opportunities in school to grapple with the ramifications of the increasing influence technology companies exert over their lives. Digital citizenship curricula could be the exception, but they typically emphasize personal safety and respectful behavior online, ignoring more participatory or justice-oriented notions of…

Leadership development efforts are enhanced by the early integration of critical perspectives. This chapter outlines a framework for integrating critical leadership development in high schools drawing on a real-world example from SOAR (Students Organizing Against Racism).

In an era of globalized education policy, the problems of equitably funding public schools have universal relevance. Critical Resource Theory (CReT), a conceptual extension of Critical Theory (CT), uses data generated from quantitative analyses of public funding to inform policy and produce more equitable resources and outcomes for low-wealth…

While adolescent foundational skills interventions can be critical levers for reading improvement, district leaders, teachers, and researchers must make complex decisions about how to evaluate their effectiveness in context. In this discussion article, we explore three issues and tensions we experienced during a 2-year research-practice…

Technology and Engineering Education (T&EE) includes "engineering design challenges" to establish a connection to designing and problem-solving indicative of being an Engineer. Engineering design challenges involving bridges (or towers) have been a common feature of the discipline. These bridge design challenges ask students to…

Traditional PD sessions share information on new practices, but teachers often can't translate that information effectively to implement the new practice in their classrooms. A better way is to show a teacher a model of excellent practice by a colleague and help her reflect on the "gap" between her practice and the model, then plan…

This essay relies on methods of narrative research to both present and consider an example of a second-wave of critical whiteness pedagogy in K-12 contexts. The author focuses on his interactions with one high school student -- Adam -- to theorize how "The Whiteness Project" allowed students to "play with whiteness" in…