Cynthia Ballenger – författare

What happens when a teacher does not share a cultural background with her students? In this thoroughly engaging account, one North American teacher describes her three years teaching Haitian children in an inner-city preschool. Using classroom research, Cynthia Ballenger explores how teachers who listen closely to children from other cultures can understand the approaches to literature that these children bring with them to school. Practitioners will identify with Ballenger, who struggles to find the academic strengths of children whose parents do not read them bedtime stories or otherwise prepare them for school in ways that are familiar to her. Focusing on three areas crucial to early childhood education (classroom behavior, concepts of print, and storybook reading), this book will challenge many widely held assumptions and cultural perspectives about the education of young children.

In her new book, bestselling author Cynthia Ballenger explores the intellectual strengths of 'puzzling children' - poor, urban, immigrant, or bilingual children who do not traditionally excel in school. Ballenger challenges the assumption that these children whose families have less formal education, read fewer storybooks, and talk less with their children about school-like topics, have fewer of what we might call 'intellectual' or academically relevant experiences. This practical book offers a detailed roadmap for traversing the daily work of teaching today's diverse population, helping educators to refine their work as it unfolds in the classroom. Ballenger guides the reader as she thinks out loud about what children said, what it indicated about their thinking, and how the dialogue informed her teaching.

Use this framework to better understand a wide range of students, including those identified as struggling.Many teachers maintain commitments to ideas and practices that they rarely question. Among these assumptions are ideas about children and the variety of reasons as to how they might learn or fail to learn. Teaching as inquiry is the practice of gaining distance from one's assumptions about teaching and learning to better serve all children, including those struggling in school (K–9). Ballenger shares stories from her experiences, demonstrating that children are always thinking and always making sense and, going further, that the ideas of our most puzzling students lead us to new recognition of what thinking looks like. Readers will learn how teaching with documentation and reflection develops and deepens their practice over time. Divided into three sections, chapters address the framework for inquiry, language and reading groups, and the interests of particular children with special needs in relation to the curriculum. Teaching Is Inquiry details the practices of teacher inquiry with a series of sometimes sad, sometimes joyful stories from the classroom.Book Features: Urges teachers to move beyond "the first look" or more superficial understandings of students.Demonstrates the value of documentation in order to better understand the ideas of a wide range of students, including those identified as struggling.Showcases the author's powers of observation that have inspired many teachers' inquiry into their own practice.Offers reflections that are both complex and open to further interpretation on the part of readers.Extends the author's examination of "puzzling moments"—encounters with students that may be difficult to comprehend or do not conform to more typical interactions.