Equity PLC Libguides: Teacher/Staff Sustainability

Millennial Teachers of Color explores the opportunities and challenges for creating and sustaining a healthy teaching force in the United States. Readers will gain insights on this unique and valuable group of prospective and practicing preK-12 educators and understanding of the need for more contemporary approaches to recruitment, preparation, hiring, and placement.

While challenging the teacher as hero trope, We Got This shows how authentically listening to kids is the closest thing to a superpower that we have. What we hear can spark action that allows us to make powerful moves toward equity by broadening access to learning for all children. A lone teacher can't eliminate inequity, but Cornelius demonstrates that a lone teacher can confront the scholastic manifestations of racism, sexism, ableism and classism by showing: exactly how he plans and revises lessons to ensure access and equity ways to look anew at explicit and tacit rules that consistently affect groups of students unequally suggestions for leaning into classroom community when it feels like the kids are against you ideas for using universal design that make curriculum relevant and accessible advocacy strategies for making classroom and schoolwide changes that expand access to opportunity to your students.

Onward tackles the problem of educator stress, and provides a practical framework for taking the burnout out of teaching. Stress is part of the job, but when 70 percent of teachers quit within their first five years because the stress is making them physically and mentally ill, things have gone too far. Unsurprisingly, these effects are highest in difficult-to-fill positions such as math, science, and foreign languages, and in urban areas and secondary classrooms—places where we need our teachers to be especially motivated and engaged. This book offers a path to resiliency to help teachers weather the storms and bounce back—and work toward banishing the rain for good.

We all want lives filled with balance, ease and contentment ― but how do we get there? In Pathways to Well-Being, authors Susan Brooks-Young and Sara Armstrong share steps to increasing well-being and discuss how six elements ― gratitude, positivity, focus, empathy, kindness and movement ― impact daily life. All of us, especially educators, influence those around us ― in our schools, in our communities and ultimately throughout the world. When we work toward supporting well-being for ourselves and others, our lives are enriched immensely. In Pathways to Well-Being, you’ll find suggestions for how to address the unexpected consequences of technology use and increase positive connections, which ultimately lead to enhanced well-being.

This expanded third edition of The New Teacher Book grew out of Rethinking Schools workshops with early career teachers. It offers practical guidance on how to flourish in schools and classrooms and connect in meaningful ways with students and families from all cultures and backgrounds

Teacher attrition has long been a significant challenge within the field of education. It is a commonly-cited statistic that almost fifty percent of beginning teachers leave the field within their first five years, to the detriment of schools, students, and their own career development. There Has to be a Better Way offers an essential voice in understanding the dynamics of teacher attrition from the perspective of the teachers themselves.

In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of public school teaching, Dana Goldstein reveals that teachers have been embattled for nearly two centuries. She uncovers the surprising roots of hot button issues, from teacher tenure to charter schools, and finds that recent popular ideas to improve schools—instituting merit pay, evaluating teachers by student test scores, ranking and firing veteran teachers, and recruiting “elite” graduates to teach—are all approaches that have been tried in the past without producing widespread change.