We ask students questions all day long, but how do we know they are actually helping students learn and, more importantly, getting them to think?

I started my teaching career at a public middle school in Toronto about two decades ago. At that time, I was not comfortable being personally out to my students.

As an elementary school art teacher, it is my job to engage my students and get them thinking critically about what and how they create.

I am a primary school teacher from East Oxford, and last year I crocheted a “mini-me” of each child in my class as an end-of-year gift.

Biology is the study of a diverse range of living things, and biology affirms all genders.

When I told my fifth-grade class that they were old enough to take charge of their own learning, something unexpected happened.

After teaching at an alternative middle school for the past 4 years, the one thing I constantly hear from new students is: “We can move around in your room and not get in trouble?

“I went into teaching so that I could help children perform well on standardized testing,” said no teacher, ever.

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.