Stirring the Chalkdust

This book examines Coalition of Essential Schools teachers who are in the midst of revising their practices to improve student performance. No longer satisfied with the kinds of compromises they've made for many years in high schools, these teachers are stirring their own most common practices to find better means to improved ends. Author Pat Wasley offers the reader five tales of teachers and their team-mates that illustrate the enormous task teachers face in reforming America's secondary schools. The book provides a detailed, close-up view of teacher's daily lives and their work with colleagues, students, and parents, including images of classroom activity, planning sessions and reflective interviews with teachers. This portrait allows readers to understand what teachers are doing to make school a place where students learn to use their minds well. The book also includes analyses of the most common changes teachers are making and of the most common challenges they encounter.