Illuminate your education path with uplifting lessons and mindful living practices. It takes courage, positivity, and passion to thrive as a teacher. This vivid and inspirational guide offers educators practical wisdom and strategies to promote their wellbeing and balance. Carol Pelletier Radford shares 10 important lessons she has learned in a long career as an educator that can help you build a fulfilling and lifelong career in education. In each lesson, readers will find: • Stories of resilience from classroom teachers • Self-care tips and assessments • Podcasts with inspiring teachers and leaders who have lived out the 10 lessons • Reading plans for teachers, teacher teams, and mentor/mentee pairs • Ways to dive deeper with additional companion website resources Teaching With Light equips courageous teachers with the tools they need to take care of themselves so they can serve their students, step into leadership, and contribute to the education profession.

Presents nine strategies for increasing the learning potential of students and encouraging participation, covering techniques such as movement, novelty, socialization, and drama, and includes sample lesson plans.

"Teachers are overworked and underpaid. Most teachers choose this profession because they see it as a vocation. It is a mission to serve others. When they begin their career they often find it stressful, bureaucratic, and complicated. Many beginning teachers question why they chose this path and up to 50% leave for other careers in their first five years. Those who stay, navigate their way through the complexities of school culture, lack of resources, and challenging students. This book is about the teachers who stay in the field of education and not only survive, they thrive on the joys they find in the day to day life of an educator. This book will be an essential (and beautiful) guide that will walk teachers through ten lessons for a fulfilling, life-long career in education. Carol will equip educators with what they need to help themselves stay sustained and inspired in a job that takes immense daily courage. Carol will share some of her own stories from her career, we will ask educators in the field (and/or other Corwin authors) to submit stories for each chapter, there will be podcast content to bolster the theme of each chapter, and there will be plenty of space for interaction and reflection as teachers walk through their reading plan. Sustaining a career in education is not for the meek or faint of heart. It is for the courageous who want to fulfill their life's path. We need positive stories, practical ways to succeed, and guidance for helping teachers finding their unique roles as educators. This reflective and inspirational guide will make those roles clear and accessible and will inspire our next generation of teachers to "stay" in teaching and contribute to the profession in a way that uses their unique skills"--

The authors of this inspirational new book were on a mission. While much has been written about teacher burnout and the day-to-day problems teachers face, little has been written about how teachers who deal with these problems overcome them, and continue to enter the classroom each morning with enthusiasm for their calling. To discover such teachers, the authors interviewed over 70 teachers in communities across the country to find teachers who, in a profession characterized by pressure, stress, and little reward, still find teaching an enjoyable, fulfilling career. The book includes over 150 teacher narratives of their real-life classroom experiences. The narratives provide unique insights into creating a teaching mission, setting up a community of learners, discovering the rewards of diversity, balancing personal and professional time, turning mistakes into excellence, using laughter to create rapport with students, and using discipline to create an atmosphere of trust and cooperation in the classroom. From these inspirational stories emerges a vision of the joys and rewards of working with children and a portrait of the teachers who have made a difference in the lives of their students and a contribution to their community. The quotes, stories, and advice written in the teachers' own words are interwoven with practical suggestions for ideas to make the classroom an inspirational environment for students and teachers alike.

Learning used to be confined to a physical place. Now, it’s no longer limited by walls or daylight or location. Learning happens in spaces that transcend these boundaries. These spaces can still have physical elements, but they are no longer defined by a physical footprint and constrained by the limitations of time, space, and matter. Learning can now take place on any device, in any place, and at any time. 21st century skills are one of the concepts we use most frequently when talking about innovative education. We see that the skills, referred to as 21st century skills, include cognitive skills such as creative thinking, problem solving, as well as many different social and emotional skills such as understanding, expressing, empathy and teamwork. Many educators now agree that not only academic knowledge is sufficient, but social-emotional skills play a role as much as academic knowledge in a person's success and happiness. Another accepted fact is the phenomenon of lifelong learning: the fact that education does not start at school but does not end at school, in fact, it is a process that should continue throughout life. While accepting all this, a subject that is not discussed much; how this holistic, lifelong learning is possible in a class in the form of 40 minutes lessons and 10 minutes of break. While we are designing various kinds of education programs for children to gain all these different skill sets in the classroom, do not we actually keep these skills in the easiest way, practically away from the environments they will acquire? In John Dewey's book, “Experience and Education” (1938), information obtained as detached from real life is depicted as wasted time and effort. Most teachers are already aware of this situation. For this reason, they try to explain math problems and literacy by linking them to children's experiences and lives as much as possible, and they do many big and small experiments in social sciences and science lessons. Can't we go one step further than this? Can't we make learning in life a part of our education system, instead of preparing small examples of real life for children? With many justified concerns such as assessment, security, teachers' pedagogical infrastructure, we miss out on the most important opportunities for education just because they are outside the walls of the school? This book aims to open new horizons in the journey of learning beyond the school walls in the world and contribute to the spread of learning in our society. In societies where constant change is the norm, schools today must prepare students to be successful in environments and contexts that may differ greatly from what we experience today. But, are we really thinking about the future? With contributions from seven continents, this book will reveal a ‘snapshot’ of some of our best thinking for building new education futures. Diverse experiences, visions, and ideas are shared to help spark new thinking among educators and policymakers, provoke conversation, and facilitate new ideas for meeting human development needs in a rapidly transforming world.