Elementary Education

Becoming a skilled anti-bias teacher is a journey. With this volume's practical guidance, you'll grow in your ability to identify, confront, and eliminate barriers of prejudice, misinformation, and bias about specific aspects of personal and social identity. Most important, you'll find tips for helping staff and children learn to respect each other, themselves, and all people. Over the last three decades, educators across the nation and around the world have gained a wealth of knowledge and experience in anti-bias work. The result is a richer and more nuanced articulation of what is important in anti-bias education. Revolving around four core goals--identity, diversity, justice, and activism--individual chapters focus on culture and language, racial identity, family structures, gender identity, economic class, different abilities, and more.

This book explores the effects of the REACH program (Recruiting and Enlightening through Access to and Communication with High-need schools), a seven-year initiative devised to help find, attract, and prepare diverse teacher candidates interested in working with young children. The book analyzes how the program, set at a national liberal arts college in the US, used the three R's: recruitment, retention, and recognition, to successfully draw in diverse educators for young children who then go on to became leaders and role models in their schools and communities. Chapters examine ways to provide the academic, social, and enrichment supports necessary for diverse teacher candidates and identify current teacher education practices that are effective as well as opportunities for change.

Constant changes in education are creating new and uncertain roles for parents and teachers that must be explored, identified, and negotiated. Preparing Educators to Engage Families: Case Studies Using an Ecological Systems Framework, Third Edition encourages readers to hone their analytic and problem-solving skills for use in real-world situations with students and their families. Organized according to Ecological Systems Theory (of the micro, meso, exo, macro, and chrono systems), this completely updated Third Edition presents research-based teaching cases that reflect critical dilemmas in family-school-community relations, especially among families for whom poverty and cultural differences are daily realities. The text looks at family engagement issues across the full continuum, from the early years through pre-adolescence. NEW TO THIS EDITION The text addresses bold and exciting new directions in the field of family engagement in education, including  the explosive growth of digital media and learning, the investment in student performance data systems, the focus on personalized student learning, and the need for systemic--rather than "random acts"--of family engagement. New theoretical perspectives on early childhood education and family engagement speak to issues of quality learning settings and school readiness.

STEPS (Science Tasks Enhance Process Skills) to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) is an inquiry-based science curriculum supplement focused on developing upper elementary and middle students' process skills and problem-solving abilities characteristic of how scientists think and act.