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When I was a kid, I attended two different elementary schools in the same town. They were very different. One was large, suburban and within walking distance to downtown. The other was very small, outside the city limits in an agricultural area and had a significant number of Spanish-speaking students.

What does your body language communicate to students?

As educators, we can never be sure of what we will face in our classrooms. This toolkit will help you and your colleagues think about how to be best prepared for your students’ needs.

Every adult in the building needs to act when the bully is a teacher.

It was meet-the-teacher night at my elementary school. The room was ready for a new class of second-graders. The rubric for grading paragraphs and stories was on the wall around the writing center. A scientific method poster hung on the wall in the science corner. Essential questions for numbers and operations were on the chalkboard in the math area. And a picture commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education was on the social studies wall. I was ready to help my children become successful students.

I stood beside Samara, my appointed student leader, with my lips shut tight, overly expressive eyes and a dry-erase marker in hand. I was ready to respond to my students in writing on the 13th annual National Day of Silence.

When I was studying to be a teacher, I had to write a philosophy of education. This essay was to explain what I believed about kids and the role teachers and education played in their lives. I wrote that all kids could learn, that they all deserved equal access to inspired teaching and that my role was to meet them wherever they were and serve them in the way that best met their needs.Although I still believe those things are true, I've come to realize that my teaching is driven more by a different philosophy than the one I wrote about.