When Challenge Brings Change: How Teacher Breakthroughs Transform the Classroom

All teachers face challenges--from the daunting and unexpected, like teaching during a pandemic, to nagging doubts about daily interactions and teaching practices. If there were ever a time for sharing teacher personal and professional breakthroughs--the ways teachers have successfully and courageously turned a corner--that time is now. In this collection of compelling narratives, high school and college teachers show us how they have taken on issues such as faculty and student relationships; struggles over personal identity in the classroom; the joys and complexities of working with emergent bilinguals, developing writers, and first-year college students; and the forever question of how to engage students. This is a book about breaking rules, caring about students, navigating systems, and taking chances. It’s an uplifting journey and along the way, teachers do what they always do: They share the reading and writing assignments that have worked for them during the best and worst of times. The matchless part, however, is teacher wisdom. Where would we be without it?

Book Features:

• Brings together narratives by veteran teachers who describe recognizable challenges and what happens when new understandings trump old ways of doing things.
• Provides ideas for teaching that arise from the breakthroughs of college, community college, and secondary teachers and are applicable to all grade levels.
• Celebrates teachers--their voices and practices, their intelligent and empathetic approaches to solving problems and making change.
• Illustrates the transformative power of writing about breakthroughs and encourages all teachers to share their stories.
• Includes an appendix with sample materials for school and writing group leaders who want to initiate similar breakthrough projects for teachers.

Sandra Murphy is professor emerita at the University of California, Davis and a former secondary teacher of English and journalism. Mary Ann Smith is a former secondary teacher of English and journalism. She directed the Bay Area and California Writing Projects and served as the director of Government Relations and Public Affairs for the National Writing Project. They are coauthors of Writing to Make an Impact: Expanding the Vision of Writing in the Secondary Classroom and Uncommonly Good Ideas--Teaching Writing in the Common Core Era.