In today’s diverse classrooms, fostering cultural awareness is essential in order to create inclusive and engaging learning environments

This past year, in a small Midwest community, we lost a student to a drug overdose. We have lost many more to drug addiction, and although we haven’t attended their funerals, they are no longer the students we once knew, while some are unrecognizable.

Most people tend to assume that my students are capable of less-than-stellar academic performances because they have complicated lives outside school.

Teaching is a great responsibility. I teach English and believe that the ability to communicate, at a personal and societal level, is what builds strong communities and ensures ownership over one’s future. Thus, it’s important that we teachers spend a lot of time on our craft—deliberating the best ways to teach and make lessons fun, interactive, and relatable to students. Professional development thrives on discipline pedagogy and school departments meet to align goals and assignments and to discuss data assessment.

After teaching ELA for over a decade, I'd come to loathe the novel study. But my opinion changed when I found the Percy Jackson series.

It’s said that there is always a blessing in dark times, and this was it: my chance to share my 1970s childhood with 25 children of 2020.

Not only do visual arts classes make space in a student’s day for creativity, they can also offer a chance to focus on something bigger.

As soon as I utter the words “writing assignment,” looks of panic appear on my students’ faces. Their hands shoot up like rockets and the questions immediately start.

In-person instruction has been a common source of stress during what I have dubbed “The Year of COVID,” with instructions on how to teach changing by the second.