Program: Mohawk Regional Teacher Center
Audience: All K-12 staff
Dates: 4/1/2024 to 5/15/2024
ClosedMRTC is offering this book study facilitated by Mykal Karl for the second time. It is a six week, 15-hour, asynchronous course. Credit hours (if your district allows) or a $375 stipend is available upon completion of this book study.
In this dazzling debut, Carla Shalaby, a former elementary school teacher, explores the everyday lives of four young "troublemakers," challenging the ways we identify and understand so-called problem children. Time and again, we make seemingly endless efforts to moderate, punish, and even medicate our children, when we should instead be concerned with transforming the very nature of our institutions, systems and structures, large and small. Through delicately crafted portraits of these memorable children―Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus―Troublemakers allows us to see school through the eyes of those who know firsthand what it means to be labeled a problem.
From Zora's proud individuality to Marcus's open willfulness, from Sean's struggle with authority to Lucas's tenacious imagination, comes profound insight―for educators and parents alike―into how schools engender, exclude, and then try to erase trouble, right along with the young people accused of making it. And although the harsh disciplining of adolescent behavior has been called out as part of a school-to-prison pipeline, the children we meet in these pages demonstrate how a child's path to excessive punishment and exclusion in fact begins at a much younger age.
Objectives: * Build authentic, positive relationships with students and among students* Teach and foster social-emotional competence among challenging students
* Increase student engagement and motivation * Foster a sustaining sense of community