I, among other things, define myself as a rapper, and it’s a fact of which my students are all too aware.

After my first week of being in a long-term occasional role, it became very clear to me that learning about being in the classroom is not the same as actually being in the classroom.

A wink to our school’s husky mascot, PAWS Time is a highly engaging, weekly enrichment program that allows our students to “pause”: Practice kindness, Always be safe, make Wise choices, and Show respect.

While teaching a Western Civilization course to high school students, I found a unique opportunity to introduce the topic of critical thinking along with the subject matter.

Teaching art history in an entirely online environment has brought a new set of challenges and opportunities that I’ve come to embrace with enthusiasm.

In my experience with teaching the Charter, a great way to connect the priorities of fifteen-year-olds with the values of this significant document is by thinking like a teen.

I have lost count of the number of times I have been told that rules without relationships lead to rebellion. Yet today, relationships with students seem to be feared instead of embraced. Over the years, quite by accident, I have discovered that this precept from days gone by is critical to classroom rules and to learning itself. Relationships are an essential part of learning, especially relationships between teachers and students.

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.

On paper, the students I was teaching had a solid grasp of grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Yet, when it came to speaking, they froze.