Teaching Outside the Box but Inside the Standards

Book excerpt: Many educators feel caught between mandates to meet literacy standards and the desire to respond to individual students’ interests, skills, and challenges. This book illustrates how a dialogical approach to practice will enable teachers to meet the needs of today’s diverse student population within a standardized curriculum. Chapters highlight the efforts of four high school teachers to create dialogical classroom space, documenting both the possibilities of and impediments to such an approach to teaching. Drawing on a theoretical framework and rationale for engaged dialogical practice, the authors present and analyze key classroom events that illustrate the productive and restrictive tensions for such work and suggest ways for teachers and schools to implement these ideas, especially for complementing and expanding the Common Core State Standards. Book Features: Examples of teachers using dialogue to engage students, as well as colleagues, administrators, parents, policymakers, and other educational stakeholders.Guidance for teachers in how to differentiate instruction to meet literacy standards.Case studies illustrating how teachers navigate the tension between standardization and student-centered teaching.An exemplary collaborative effort among a university researcher, doctoral students, and high school teachers.The reflections and self-questioning of teachers who write honestly, engagingly, and insightfully about their dialogical practices.