Answerable Teaching · Answerable Teaching

I teach ninth-grade biology in a high-poverty public school in Delaware, and I am writing a book about what I have learned there: that the crisis we call student disengagement is mostly a crisis of recognition, and that teachers can learn to read the forms of agency students already have. The early chapters are below, a section at a time. This is a working draft, and I would rather have your eyes on it now than later.

Read what interests you. Argue with it. Tell me where it loses you, and where it sounds like your classroom.

PrefaceWhy AI exposed a teaching problem it didn't create.IntroductionThe Sunday scaries, and what this book is actually for.Chapter 1 — DisconnectAngie and Nancy: two students whose thinking their classrooms couldn't read.Chapter 2 — What Is Agency? Why Do We Want It?The definition, the four personas, and the seven-form map.Chapter 3 — The Three School ModelsWhat each model surfaces, buries, and polices — in teachers as much as students.

Want the rest of the book? The later chapters exist in draft: why classrooms manufacture disengagement, dialogic teaching, and the classroom designs that make thinking doable. Email me and I'll send them along.

Comments, pushback, and stories from your own classroom are exactly what a working draft is for: send them here.