Standardized curricula and rigid approaches to teaching don’t engage students and don’t allow teachers to bring their true expertise to the classroom. But there is another path. Learn how to engage in instructional resistance to bring joy, purposefulness, and rigor back into your classrooms.
Standardized curricula and rigid approaches to teaching don’t engage students and don’t allow teachers to bring their true expertise to the classroom. But there is another path. Learn how to engage in instructional resistance to bring joy, purposefulness, and rigor back into your classrooms. In this empowering book, Paul S. Sutton shows how you can use your instructional expertise and skills to better serve students by resisting wrong-headed curricular mandates imposed upon you. He offers an instructional resistance framework that gives you a way to respond to the practices and policies you know are not in the best interest of your students. You’ll learn that you have more power than you think to question and critique the curricular mandates required by your district and school and to make small, actionable, yet powerful changes to your practice that will change your classroom culture and bring more fulfilling teaching and more engaged learning. Throughout, there are case studies, examples, tools, and strategies applicable to all grade levels so you can start to become the teacher you imagined yourself to be, starting the very next day. A Teacher’s Guide to Instructional Resistance is inherently empowering and hopeful. This book will leave you feeling ready to leverage your creative genius in service of all of your students.
1. How the Education System Became What It Is
2. Learning From the
Redemptive Moxie of Excellent Teachers
3. The Who of Teaching: Building the
Capacity to Be a Better Teacher
4. The How of Teaching: Taking the First
Step
5. The How of Teaching: What the Research Says
6. The What of
Teaching: Resisting the Madness to Better Serve Students
7. Moving From Where
We Are Now to Better
Paul S. Sutton is an Associate Professor of Education and the Director of the First Year Experience Program at Pacific Lutheran University. Before transitioning into his current role, he spent eight years as a public high school English teacher, worked as an adjunct instructor at several community colleges in the greater Puget Sound region, and worked as a teacher in a language school in Istanbul, Turkey. He is passionate about issues of equity and racial equity in education. In his personal and professional life, he participates in various projects and initiatives to make schools and classrooms more affirming spaces of belonging for students, families, and communities who identify as members of groups of people who have and continue to be marginalized by the school system.
