What does it mean to teach for human dignity? How does one do so? This practical book shows how the leaders at four urban public schools used a process called Descriptive Inquiry to create democratic schools that promote and protect human dignity. The authors argue that teachers must attend to who a child is and find a way to create classrooms…

There are situations where teachers accustomed to years of traditional teaching are tasked with implementing inquiry-based science teaching in schools nationwide, with few professional developments to change their self-efficacy. The implicit expectations are that teachers' self-efficacy will improve as they implement inquiry-based practices over…

New York City public schools, serving nearly one million students, are some of the most segregated in the nation. The Bronx, one of the poorest school districts in New York City, serving students who are 83% Black or Hispanic, has been plagued by persistent racial disproportionalities. Top-down change efforts have consistently failed. Improvement…

On average, Florida students earn only half of the points possible in the statistics content area of the state's annual mathematics assessment. Leaders in Broward County Public Schools, a large, diverse, urban school district, viewed changes to statistics curriculum and instruction as one way to address this issue. This study randomly assigned 40…

Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) has identified low student achievement in statistics in the middle grades as a critical concern. It has also expressed concern that statistics instruction does not meet the level of cognitive complexity described in the state curriculum standards. This randomized controlled trial in 40 BCPS middle schools…

"The More We Look, the Deeper It Gets: Transforming the Curriculum through Art" provides inspiration and practical guidance for teaching with works of art in order to deepen engagement and improve student learning. The book introduces the Pyramid of Inquiry, a flexible framework that teachers of all subject areas can use to support…

Substantial, involved, and expensive efforts to promote the dissemination of scientific knowledge and career interest in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) are enthusiastically supported by many scientific, federal, and local organizations. The articulated underlying goals for these efforts include an enhanced public…

These are the appendixes for the report "Effects of an Inquiry-Oriented Curriculum and Professional Development Program on Grade 7 Students' Understanding of Statistics and on Statistics Instruction." This cluster-randomized controlled trial compared the Supporting Teacher Enactment of the Probability and Statistics Standards (STEPSS)…

In this chapter, we argue that science education is more than the high stakes, rigorous practices and methodology that students often find dull and uninspiring. We present that aesthetic and humanistic motivations, such as wonder, curiosity, and social justice, are also inherent reasons for doing science. In the MSUrbanSTEM program, we designed an…

I examine one set of elementary school library standards (New York City School Library System, n.d.) in an effort to analyze the impact that the standards might have on literacy experiences for young children in one urban school setting. Employing a critical discourse analysis framework, I examine the language that the Empire State Information…

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine, understand, and describe the elements of restorative justice programs (relationships, community building, accountability, empathy) that high school principals and teachers in public school districts located in San Bernardino County, California perceive as most beneficial for changing…

"Place: it's where we're from; it's where we're going. . . . It asks for our attention and care. If we pay attention, place has much to teach us." With this belief as a foundation, "The Power of Place" offers a comprehensive and compelling case for making communities the locus of learning for students of all ages and…

Principals are isolated in their work and suffer from low morale. The role of the principal has become increasingly complex and demanding especially within the current accountability model with the public nature of school report cards. This is a problem in Rocky Top Public Schools and in school districts across the country. The purpose of this…

According to Vande Zande (2007), understanding the Design Process can help students become stronger critical thinkers. With this in mind, Andrew Watson decided to undertake an observational case study in which he focused directly on Design Thinking and addressed it more intentionally in his teaching. The hope was to understand how students saw…

In this autoethnography, I examine the challenges I faced as a private-to-public-sector novice CFO entering a resource-constrained 41-thousand-student K-12 urban school district in Colorado. This study chronicles how I deliberately slowed down my interactions within a complex adaptive system (CAS) through ethnographic interviewing to identify the…