educators must create safe and trusting environments that are respectful of students’ culture. Teaching the neoindigenous requires recognition of the spaces in which they reside, and an understanding of how to see, enter into, and draw from these spaces

a distortion of the student’s self-image. This was the case even though the student mentioned that she liked the subject being taught and was excited about what she was learning in her science class. This teacher, who struggled to get her students engaged in science, had alienated one of the few students who liked the class

She responded that a friend shares her books with her and lends her something to write with whenever she needs it. For her, that made it obvious that she was prepared to learn. She then mentioned that she was always on time for class. “I’m always at the door when that bell rings. I’m always there.” The student saw herself as prepared and on time, but the teacher did not see the student the way she saw herself.

remember that react-ing is not the same as being reactionary

In other words, when you wobble, it doesn’t mean that you’re failing. Rather, it signals that you are pursuing worthwhile poses that require learning, reflection, and professional growth.

experienced practitioners not only expect to wobble, they welcome it:

Wobble occurs routinely in the classroom when something unexpected emerges, such as an unpredictable question that neither the students (nor you, for that matter) can adequately address, or a spat that breaks out be-tween students that has absolutely nothing to do with the academic subject at hand. When wobble occurs, you may feel as if nothing in your teach-er education program has prepared you for this, and you may very well be right.

a pose is far more than a “best practice,” which, as we pointed out earlier, is an idea that relies on the myth that some teaching techniques are so foolproof they will work with all students in all contexts for all time.

/W/F cycles most successfully when we collaborate with colleagues who provide moral support and at the same time challenge our thinking.

for the often frustrating feelings of uncertainty inherent in the re-cursive process of improving one’s practice.

But we can say from experience that even teachers whose practice is apparently seamless to the outside eye will continue to wobble in response to changes in their teaching contexts.

we know that though our uncertainties and apprehensions differ from those we experienced in our early years of teaching, we have them all the same. What’s changed is that we don’t view them as liabilities, but as challenges that can further our pro-fessional growth.

teachers have a special responsibility to teach from a social justice perspective, tack-ling issues of privilege, problems of equity and access, and the possibilities inherent in social and civic action

Verbal memory can be trained in committing tasks, a certain discipline of the reasoning powers can be acquired through lessons in science and mathematics; but, after all, this is somewhat remote and shadowy compared with the training of attention and of judgment that is acquired in having to do things with a real motive behind and a real outcome ahead.

The modification going on in the method and curriculum of education is as much a product of the changed social situation, and as much an effort to meet the needs of the new society that is forming, as are changes in modes of industry and commerce.

The result has been an intellectual revolution. Learning has been put into circulation.

everyone has a calling and occupation, something to do. Some are managers and others are subordinates. But the great thing for one as for the other is that each shall have had the education which enables him to see within his daily work all there is in it of large and human significance.

But if the end in view is the development of a spirit of social coöperation and community life, discipline must grow out of and be relative to this. There is little order of one sort where things are in process of construction; there is a certain disorder in any busy workshop; there is not silence; persons are not engaged in maintaining certain fixed physical postures; their arms are not folded; they are not holding their books thus and so. They are doing a variety of things, and there is the confusion, the bustle, that results from activity.

Where the school work consists in simply learning lessons, mutual assistance, instead of being the most natural form of coöperation and association, becomes a clandestine effort to relieve one’s neighbor of his proper duties. Where active work is going on all this is changed. Helping others, instead of being a form of charity which impoverishes the recipient, is simply an aid in setting free the powers and furthering the impulse of the one helped.

We must conceive of them in their social significance, as types of the processes by which society keeps itself going, as agencies for bringing home to the child some of the primal necessities of community life, and as ways in which these needs have been met by the growing insight and ingenuity of man; in short, as instrumentalities through which the school itself shall be made a genuine form of active community life, instead of a place set apart in which to learn lessons.

Consciousness of its real import is still so weak that the work is often done in a half-hearted, confused, and unrelated way. The reasons assigned to justify it are painfully inadequate or sometimes even positively wrong.

But the point of view is, upon the whole, unnecessarily narrow.

we cannot overlook the importance for educational purposes of the close and intimate acquaintance got with nature at first hand, with real things and materials, with the actual processes of their manipulation, and the knowledge of their social necessities and uses.