Stephanie Sisk-Hilton

Discover new ways to help elementary students engage with and understand the world around them through place-based, hope-filled learning about the causes, impacts, and responses to climate change. This book features foundational climate concepts, easily implementable activity plans, and inspiring examples of student engagement. Each chapter begins with a short vignette pulled from the author’s considerable teaching experience in engaging students in concepts of climate change and climate justice, followed by content-focused sections and recommendations for student activities and projects. The author provides stories of hope-filled action to invite teachers to look for and reflect on similar narratives in their own communities. Sample units of study for grades K-5 show teachers how key ideas from each chapter come together into an instructional plan that incorporates the three dimensions of NGSS and can fit into the broader outline of their school year. This resource is an accessible tool to support any elementary educator in building their own knowledge base and integrating the important and timely issues of climate change into their classroom.

Discover new ways to help elementary students engage with and understand the world around them through place-based, hope-filled learning about the causes, impacts, and responses to climate change. This book features foundational climate concepts, easily implementable activity plans, and inspiring examples of student engagement. Each chapter begins with a short vignette pulled from the author’s considerable teaching experience in engaging students in concepts of climate change and climate justice, followed by content-focused sections and recommendations for student activities and projects. The author provides stories of hope-filled action to invite teachers to look for and reflect on similar narratives in their own communities. Sample units of study for grades K-5 show teachers how key ideas from each chapter come together into an instructional plan that incorporates the three dimensions of NGSS and can fit into the broader outline of their school year. This resource is an accessible tool to support any elementary educator in building their own knowledge base and integrating the important and timely issues of climate change into their classroom.

As top-down educational reform policies at local and national levels increasingly isolate teachers from their own professional and instructional agency, and stultify children’s passion for learning, new techniques are needed for understanding and transforming educational practices. Narrative Inquiry in Early Childhood and Elementary School: Learning to Teach, Teaching Well facilitates meaningful change in early years education by providing early childhood and elementary school teachers with methods to incorporate narrative into their instruction and inquiry. This book offers practical strategies for incorporating narrative tools and structures into the classroom, and encouraging effective conceptual, pedagogical, and personal avenues for engaged teaching and learning across languages and cultures. The book’s chapters promote a lively discussion of central tenets of narrative inquiry and illustrative examples of teachers at work with narrative and inquiry for improving their practice and children’s learning.

As top-down educational reform policies at local and national levels increasingly isolate teachers from their own professional and instructional agency, and stultify children’s passion for learning, new techniques are needed for understanding and transforming educational practices. Narrative Inquiry in Early Childhood and Elementary School: Learning to Teach, Teaching Well facilitates meaningful change in early years education by providing early childhood and elementary school teachers with methods to incorporate narrative into their instruction and inquiry. This book offers practical strategies for incorporating narrative tools and structures into the classroom, and encouraging effective conceptual, pedagogical, and personal avenues for engaged teaching and learning across languages and cultures. The book’s chapters promote a lively discussion of central tenets of narrative inquiry and illustrative examples of teachers at work with narrative and inquiry for improving their practice and children’s learning.

This is the inspiring story of a group of teachers that engaged in inquiry about their own practice in order to support inquiry learning in their students. The Supporting Knowledge Integration for Inquiry Practice (SKIIP) is an exciting new professional development program that brings together the strengths and benefits of several existing models: participant-directed inquiry, school/university partnerships, and the shared pedagogical improvement model of Japanese lesson study. Based on the work of urban, public school teachers over the course of three years, the SKIIP approach was developed to assist teachers in the daunting task of integrating new pedagogies, curricula, and technologies into their practice.