Professional Development

Teaching in PreK-12 classrooms requires not only pedagogical knowledge and field-related skill, but also creativity, flexibility, and responsiveness. Teachers, as lifelong learners and as leaders in education, must make sense of curricula, policies, research, and evidence in order to guide and shape their practices in unique and diverse contexts. How teachers make use of these “best practice” guides varies — there is no one-size-fits-all program or method that can be picked up and applied without classroom teachers’ localized and reflective contextualization. Designed for use by preservice teachers, experienced educators, mentors and coaches, school leaders, and teacher preparation faculty, Recognizing “Best Practices” as Locally Situated calls teachers into their power to disrupt, transform, and lead towards change in PreK-12 schools. This volume makes visible the critical work teachers engage in daily as they evaluate, interpret, implement, and assess the impact of particular strategies, resources, and approaches in their classrooms. Teachers must iterate on their teaching practice in cycles of continuous learning and reflection toward educational equity and social justice. Recognizing “Best Practices” as Locally Situated celebrates the voices, power, and pedagogical practices of teachers across a variety of content areas and settings, ranging from early childhood to adolescence and from transnational contexts, including multilingual classrooms in the U.S., Lebanon, and Ukraine, along with teacher preparation programs in the U.S. and Europe. Through vignettes, analysis, reflective prompts, lesson plans, resources, and activities, the authors make clear that teachers are agentic, innovative, and adaptive practitioners who translate evidence-based “best practices” into context-specific, responsive, and learner-centered pedagogical moves that build upon the assets of their students to support learning. They invite readers into their (trans)local worlds as readers’ shape and reconfigure their own (trans)local classrooms, schools, and educational ecosystems. Recognizing “Best Practices” as Locally Situated aims to bring together the voices of practitioners across K-12 education to examine their situated and expert testing, adaptation, and refusal of “best practices” within their classrooms and communities. The authors explore a best practice, as housed in this partially archived version of the U.S. Department of Education's Best Practices Clearinghouse or as explicitly named in research or practitioner literature. They explain the ways they have tested, accepted, rejected, modified, or otherwise adapted and contextualized that “best practice” within their own teaching context and with equity, inclusion, diversity, belonging, and social justice in mind. Recognizing “Best Practices” as Locally Situated provides an important overview and critique of currently circulating “best practices” for both novice and experienced educators. It provides classroom-tested pedagogical modes and resources with methodologies for engaging critically with “evidence,” including through generation of new evidence and knowledge bases situated within particular communities, times, places, and policy contexts. As part of Dr. Linsay DeMartino and Dr. Lisa Fetman's book series Demystifying Social Justice Education: Moving from Trendy to Transformative Equity and Justice Practices in Schools, this book aligns through its focus on equity and justice and the dismantling of taken-for-granted or “trendy” practices and policies in education. The collection of texts draws upon the lived experiences of educators, education researchers, community program leaders, and students and families to provide new evidence and as contributions to the literature centering around what is possible in equitable, responsive, belonging, and socially-just education.Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment in Diverse Classrooms; Introduction to Educating For Equity And Social Justice; Cultivating Culturally Responsive Classrooms; Critically Reflective Teaching; Adolescent Identities, Literacies, and Communities; Integrated Content and Language Learning (TESOL/TEFL/Bilingual Ed); Literacy Methods in Multilingual Classrooms; Resisting and Transforming the Purpose of Education: Education for Freedom; Professional Development and Leadership; Inquiry-Based Professional Learning; Introduction to Teacher Leadership And School Improvement

Digital Age Leadership: Building Effective Multi-Generational Online Teaching Teams is a practical guide for educational and organizational leaders managing diverse, multi-generational teams in online environments. In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, understanding how to lead teams made up of Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, and Generation Z is essential for success. This book provides a framework for understanding generational dynamics, adapting leadership strategies, and building collaborative, high-performing teams in online settings. Each generation brings unique strengths, communication styles, and expectations to the digital classroom, creating both challenges and opportunities for growth. Digital Age Leadership explores how these generational traits influence leadership and team dynamics, providing practical strategies for building trust, bridging gaps, and fostering an inclusive and cohesive team culture. By leveraging the strengths of each generation, leaders can cultivate an environment where all team members thrive. These strategies will empower leaders to implement lasting change within their teams and organizations, ensuring long-term success and growth in the digital age. Drawing from extensive research and real-world experience, Digital Age Leadership serves as both an academic text and a professional development resource. It includes discussion questions, team exercises, and practical scenarios for immediate use, making it ideal for individual growth, team training, and academic course adoption. These elements ensure the book is accessible to educators, administrators, and organizational leaders. The book has proven to be the ultimate resource for leaders who want to build, develop, and sustain high-performing, adaptable teams in the ever-evolving world of online education. Digital Age Leadership: Navigating Multi-Generational Online Teaching Teams will appeal to a wide range of readers. These include educational administrators and corporate leaders responsible for managing online learning and training programs. K-12 online school principals and directors, higher education program administrators, department chairs, and professional development specialists who oversee virtual teaching teams will find great value in the framework presented in the book. The book will also benefit graduate students, faculty in educational leadership and technology programs, and corporate learning leaders managing online training. It targets professionals seeking both theoretical insights and practical tools for leading multi-generational online teaching teams.Perfect for courses such as: Educational Leadership in the Digital Age; Managing Multi-Generational Teams in Higher Education; Online Teaching and Learning Strategies; Leadership in Digital Education Environments; Transformative Leadership in Online Education; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Online Education; Technology Integration and Team Building in Education; Collaborative Learning in Virtual Environments; Building and Leading Remote Educational Teams; Developing Effective Online Teaching Communities

Mistakes We Have Made: Implications for Social Justice Educators, second edition, continues the conversation started in the first edition. Dr. Bre Evans-Santiago has once again collected a variety of voices from authors with a wealth of experience teaching in K-12 schools and utilizing culturally relevant practices. This new edition is current with social justice research and strategies, while connecting the audience through personal vignettes in each chapter. The context is organized into three themes: Inclusive Classrooms, Curriculum Implementation, and Professionalism. Reflection questions are provided at the end of each chapter, which will guide the practitioners to self-reflect and plan next steps accordingly. The e-book provides links to videos, strategies, articles, and other supplemental materials to make this text a "one-stop-shop." Mistakes We Have Made speaks to several audiences, from pre-service teachers to any practitioner that needs a new perspective on teaching with a social justice lens. This text can be used in a variety of college courses, professional development workshops, or as a gift for new teachers.Perfect for courses such as: Social Justice for Educators | Diverse Perspectives for Educational Leaders | Diversity and Multiculturalism | Sociocultural Foundations in Education | Issues in Education | Elementary Teacher Foundations | Sociology of Education

The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy: Empowered Educators on the Front Lines is a powerful and timely anthology that amplifies the voices of education activists from across the United States who are committed to reimagining what it means to be an educator in today's challenging climate. At its heart, this book is a testament to the unwavering spirit of those who enter the classroom not just to teach, but to make a lasting impact on the lives of their students and the future of our society. In these pages, readers will find stories of courage, resilience, and resistance—narratives that highlight the importance of holding onto one’s core values amid increasing political, social, and institutional pressures. The educators featured in this compilation don’t just teach curriculum—they build authentic relationships with their students, create inclusive learning environments, and refuse to accept the status quo when it harms the very children they serve. More than a celebration of individual triumphs, The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy serves as a call to view education through a broader societal lens. It urges educators and readers alike to acknowledge how systemic inequities, policy decisions, and cultural narratives shape our schools and the experiences within them. Without this context, burnout is inevitable and attrition becomes a painful norm. This book also challenges its audience to think beyond immediate outcomes. The fight for justice and equity in education is a long game—one that may not yield tangible change within a single career or even a single lifetime. But these stories affirm that the work must continue. Educators must rise, speak out, organize, and even disrupt unjust systems to protect the very soul of our democracy. For new teachers, seasoned educators, and anyone invested in the future of public education, The Critical Importance of Teacher Advocacy is both a rallying cry and a source of deep inspiration. The work is hard—but these stories prove that it is always worth it. The book is a valuable teaching tool and textbook in a variety of classes for preservice teachers. It also is a great research tool for scholars working in teacher advocacy.

Beyond Compensation: Empowering Teachers’ Unions to Think Beyond Bread-and-Butter Issues is an incredibly important book that explores the value of union representation of teachers on the front lines of public education. After the 2018 Supreme Court ruling on Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), educators and other union members wondered why they should belong to a union. This book provides an answer and demonstrates that the role of teachers’ unions goes far beyond bread-and-butter issues as shown in the myriad priorities they are involved in. Teachers’ unions today are requesting additional funding for education to improve outcomes for all students—including those who are disadvantaged, as well as racial and ethnic and sexual-minority students and English-language learners. The goal of teachers’ unions is not simply to represent the rights of their members, but rather to improve education on the whole. They are seeking smaller class sizes, safer schools, and the addition of nurses and counselors, issues that go beyond increased pay for teachers. The book explores in detail the role of one teachers’ union, the Washington Teachers’ Union and its parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers, and their priorities as a roadmap for how other teachers’ unions might pursue these goals and the hazards they might face. The author discusses major educational issues such as teacher evaluation, merit pay for teachers, standardized testing, and community schools and warns about the dangers of vouchers and charter schools. Beyond Compensation is a volume in The Badass Teachers Association Education Series. The series serves to contribute to educators’ and educational leaders’ understandings of the need for teacher education, activism, and leadership in these areas. It will provide a place for future and current educators to learn more about these issues and how they can build their classrooms and communities into the spaces all students deserve. The series consists of print books and e-books for current educators, pre-service teachers, parents, and others in the greater community.

In these times, decisions large and small can have important consequences for educators. Everything from daily curricular choices and interpersonal encounters to long-term educational aims and approaches to educator-client relations is up for careful decision-making. While not every professional decision requires careful preparation and defense, more than ever, in our increasingly polarized, distrustful, and argumentative world, many more than we might anticipate do. How should educators prepare to make careful, defensible public decisions affecting their students and themselves? An important part of that preparation involves training in a range of logical and interpersonal abilities that come before and help to make good educational decisions. A Preface to Educational Decision-Making is aimed at describing those abilities, illustrating their professional uses, and providing a starting point for increasing educators’ practical skills in applying them. What are these abilities? For the most part, they involve common-sense attention to the ways that educators can become clearer about the nature of actual decisions they are asked to make, and aware of what must be done to make those decisions ones that all concerned can recognize as reasonable and as logically presented, even if not universally agreeable. In short, these are factors that provide, for decision-makers and their audiences, a preface to decisions that matter to those who make them and to those affected by them. A most important, though widely ignored set of those abilities center on making the nature of particular decisions clear to all concerned. Those abilities involve becoming sensitive to the ways such decisions can become or can be made to be unclear. In the give and take of public educational decision-making processes, bad decisions are often, even usually begin with confusion over what is to be decided and over what is proposed as the decision to make. The ability to get clarification, and the habit of clarifying before committing are crucial to good decision-making. A second set of preparatory abilities involve recognizing what must be done to actually decide what is true and/or advisable, as part of a decision at hand. Making what is recognized as a reasonable and well-reasoned decision depends in large part on applying those abilities clearly and often publicly. These two large sets of abilities are crucially connected. Making clear to oneself and to others what is to be decided is part and parcel of becoming aware of how to decide an issue at hand. This book works to explain the connections and to describe the order of their application. While most of these abilities have been described in other texts on what is usually called “informal logic,” A Preface to Educational Decision-Making is especially concerned with the sorts of decision that educators are called on to make in their professional lives. Moreover, this book widens the range of abilities to clarify and support professional decisions beyond what is usually discussed. The sections on educational speech acts and on deciding what to call true or advisable provide useful additions to educators’ repertoire of decision-making abilities. Finally, the discussion of interpersonal factors in public decision-making offers useful guides to reaching decisions with other educators and with clients.Perfect for courses such as: Foundations of Education; Philosophy; Social Foundations, Methods Courses in Education; Pre-student Teaching; and most Graduate courses in Educational Theory, Curriculum, Social Issues

Transformative Inquiry: Integrating Action Research and Systems Thinking explores how two dynamic methodologies—action research and systems thinking—can be combined to address complex challenges in education, healthcare, organizational leadership, and public policy. Grounded in participatory, iterative processes, both approaches emphasize collaboration, reflection, and systemic improvement. Together, they provide a flexible yet rigorous framework for change.This edited volume brings together scholars and practitioners to examine the historical foundations, theoretical intersections, and applied integration of action research and systems thinking. Chapters include conceptual models and case studies drawn from K–12 schools, higher education, health professions education, digital learning environments, and leadership development. Contributors demonstrate how these frameworks support root-cause analysis, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive interventions that move beyond surface-level solutions.Each chapter illustrates how reflective cycles of inquiry, when combined with systems thinking tools such as feedback loops and mental models, can uncover persistent barriers and guide meaningful, context-sensitive change. Topics include digital equity, culturally responsive pedagogy, instructional redesign, performance improvement, and professional learning.Transformative Inquiry will be of interest to scholars, educators, researchers, and practitioners seeking tools for leading improvement in complex systems. It supports graduate and doctoral-level courses in research methods, systems change, and leadership, as well as professional learning in schools, universities, and organizations.

Recognizing the "diversity crisis" in regards to the cultural dissonance between educators and their diverse students, Diversifying the Educator Pipeline provides a critical examination of the mistakes we have made in our efforts to bolster the presence of Black educators. Grounded with the historical context of Black educators in America, Shaylyn Marks weaves research, practice and personal accounts to critically examine why efforts to diversify the educator pipeline have not yielded the desired results. With an analytical lens, the recruitment, preparation, and retention of Black educators is examined while offering alternative practices to strengthen these efforts. Acknowledging the cyclical nature of potential trauma and harm that occurs in educational spaces, insights and recommendations are provided for all stakeholders as a means to cultivate a diverse educator workforce that better supports and reflects diverse classrooms of students. Diversifying the Educator Pipeline illuminates issues pertaining to the ways in which Black students and educators are disenfranchised, and serves as a call to action for the education community.Perfect for courses such as: Socio-Cultural Foundations of Education; Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice; Cultural Perspectives in Education; Afrofuturism: in Search of the Black Fantastic; Black Feminist and Womanist Perspectives; Educational Leadership; Curriculum Development and Transformation; Advanced Topics in Education; Critical Thinking and contemporary Social Problem; Race and Ethnic Relations; The African American Experience in the United States; Cultural Diversity in U.S. Schools; and Sociology of Education

For any educator, administrator, or school leader who is committed to promoting student success, Unreached: What Every Educator Wants to Know About Engaging Families for Equity and Student Achievement is an indispensable resource. The premise of the book is grounded in the research that confirms that student achievement is closely tied to effective family partnerships, yet for many educators, identifying how to engage families as partners can feel overwhelming and nebulous. As a result, there is often a disconnect between schools and families that leads to families feeling excluded from the type of meaningful partnership efforts that can support student achievement. Unreached tackles this challenge by offering a clear roadmap for overcoming these barriers and cultivating trust between families and schools. One of the standout features of this volume is its focus on relevant, real-world applications designed to help districts and schools implement a sustainable approach that can support clear and meaningful gains for students.Trice Moore presents a series of practices, tips and a process for addressing the barriers that often prevent families from participating in their student’s education as partners. Drawing on research and practical scenarios, the book highlights the importance of viewing partnerships with families as a tool for advancing educational equity and offers insights on ways effective partnerships can play a pivotal role in promoting success for all students. At the heart of the book is a compelling overview of some of the systemic inequities and barriers that often exist in schools and how educators and school leaders can play a role in either perpetuating or dismantling those systems.Written by a leading voice in the field of family outreach and engagement, the book delves into the power of meaningful connections and offers four specific partnership recommendations and five authentic leadership practices to transform how schools partner with families to support student success. Unreached is not just a theoretical guide; it is a practical, hands-on resource filled with actionable strategies for educators, school teams and education leaders. Readers will learn how to earn trust with families, share responsibility and balance expectations respectfully across and beyond cultural differences within an environment where all parties feel valued and heard.The book also includes tools for developing family engagement plans, assessing your partnership approach and a recommendation summary for school teams. This workbook provides a thoughtful examination of the challenges linked to family engagement and a variety of tools for overcoming those challenges. It is an essential guide for educators seeking to bridge the gap between families and schools in ways that can help create an inclusive, equitable, and high-achieving environment for students. With a blend of practical scenarios, tools, tips and actionable insights, Unreached is a must-read for anyone interested in making gains in student achievement through culturally responsive family and community partnerships.Perfect for courses such as: Introduction, Intermediate, and Advanced courses in Family and Community Engagement, Leadership

Do you have the desire to build relationships with the special education teachers in your school or district but constantly feel weighed down by compliance issues? Special education teachers are leaving the field at alarming rates, and positive change through transformational leadership practices can help administrators build confidence and self-efficacy as leaders of special education programs and strengthen special education teachers’ commitment to remain in the field. In a book that guides an affective journey using John C. Maxwell’s teachings, Natasha Veale, a former special education teacher, professor of special education, and certified Maxwell Leadership consultant, demonstrates how to address administrators’ belief in their ability to become influential special education leaders and connect with their special education teachers, even without a background in special education. This book is ideal for pre-service and in-service assistant principals and principals, special education administrators, and general and special education teachers. Embedded school administrators’ anecdotes reveal experiences, challenges, and desires to build an emotionally supportive environment for their special education teachers. Practical advice and tips are offered to help administrators positively influence, individually consider, intellectually stimulate, and inspirationally motivate their special education teachers. In How to Retain Special Education Teachers: A Transformational Leadership Guide for School Administrators, you learn how to: Support special education teacher workload Build self-efficacy as a leader of special education Build relationships with special education teachers Strengthen Principal Preparation Programs This is a critically important book that should be read by every school administrator and by every College of Education faculty member involved in any area of special education.Perfect for courses such as: Principal Leadership for Special Education; Special Education Administration; Educational Leadership; Developing Teachers; Strategic Human Capital Leadership; Leading Change in Education; and Foundations in Education