I recently had the opportunity to join Dr. Sheldon Eakins for a thoughtful conversation about school discipline, student voice, and what it means for schools to truly serve students. We discussed blanket policies, exclusion, facilitation versus control, and why healthy learning communities cannot be built on compliance alone.

Every school community is made up of many cultures, yet one culture tends to dominate. In my work as an educator, I am part of that dominant culture. I think about this constantly, before a post, a conversation, or a decision at school. How does my position shape the system? And more importantly, how can I use it to support students from non-dominant cultures?

What happens when student voice feels like it makes the classroom harder to manage? This post introduces the first Office Hours conversation, where we sit with the tension between control, responsibility, and meaningful student participation.

Public education is built for outdated systems. Dr. Cameron McCuaig’s welcome video explains why it’s time to shift to student-first learning, centering voice, agency, and belonging in the classroom.

Taking the Good, Leaving the Bad:  An essay on how one school administrator blends system level policy with school level  leadership  The Thames Valley District School Board (TVDSB), my school district, operates a  leadership model consisting of a top-down hierarchy of policy creation which contradicts  its vision statement, resulting in disingenuous attempts at incorporating equitable  practices and an avoidance of honouring the voices of those who matter most, the  students

It was my third year teaching in a full day kindergarten class under Ontario, Canada’s relatively  new play and inquiry based learning model. One of the students in my class, who we will refer to as Mike, presented me with the catalyst to dive into social change. Mike was of dark  complexion and his father was raising him alone. His father had told me that Mike’s mother was  addicted to drugs and alcohol during pregnancy and that Mike had a diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol  Spectru

Teaching can feel isolating, especially when you are trying to do things differently. Many educators care deeply about student voice, democratic classrooms, and rights-based approaches to discipline and learning. But caring about these ideas and actually implementing them inside real schools, with real constraints, are two very different things. The Rights-Based Teaching Collective was created to bridge that gap. Not as a training program. Not as a one-way resource drop. But