Meeting the Challenges: Stories from Today's Classrooms

What exactly does "meeting the challenges" mean in the context of today's classroom? Are the challenges teachers face today significantly different from those when we were in school? Maureen Barbieri and Carol Tateishi think so. The teacher accounts that they have collected here represent the hard, sometimes frustrating, always inspiring work going on across the country, where, for a variety of reasons, students are less than enthusiastic about learning.

Not all of the accounts are success stories, but every one is candid, thought provoking, and moving. These teachers know their students well; they strive to develop classroom cultures that nurture self-worth, engagement, and passionate curiosity. While the contexts vary widely, the teachers have several common values: high expectations, a belief in the necessity of a classroom community, and a willingness to adapt their personal styles to meet the needs of their particular students. These teachers eschew orthodoxies, choosing instead to work from personal philosophies that rely on both traditional and progressive techniques.

Teachers of all ages, from kindergarten through high school, will identify with the authors' frustration, determination, and vision. They will also discover new approaches to enticing resistant learners into literacy and new reasons to continue in the profession. More important than any particular teaching behavior is the sense of collegiality readers will experience here. Truly Meeting the Challenges is reassurance that no one is alone after all.

Maureen Barbieri has taught middle school in New Hampshire, Ohio, and South Carolina. Since coming to New York, she has been a staff developer in District 2 and a divisional head at Marymount, an all girls' independent school. In addition to frequent consulting, she now teaches literacy courses in the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University's Steinhardt School of Education, where she co-directs the summer writing institute. Her book, Sounds from the Heart: Learning to Listen to Girls (Heinemann, 1995), received the James N. Britton Award for Inquiry with the English Language Arts from the National Council of Teachers of English as well as the International Educator's Award from the Delta Kappa Gamma Society.

Carol Tateishi has taught English to middle school students in the Bay Area for over fourteen years. She also spent two years in London teaching upper elementary children. Currently, she is the director of the Bay Area Writing Project at the University of California at Berkeley, and an associate director of the National Writing Project. She has conducted workshops on the teaching of writing throughout the Bay Area, various cities across the country, and in Japan, Korea, and Puerto Rico.