What really matters to your students? They might say the issues in front of them at school and in life. When students inquire into those issues and they’re given an opportunity for their arguments to be read by the city council or published in the local newspaper, they’re eager to research and find relevant information in nonfiction texts to bolster their claims. They become committed to writing, revising, editing and correcting their grammar. They want to think broadly about what reasoning will be effective with their audience. Whether you teach English, social studies, science, or math. From Inquiry to Action by Steve Zemelman’s helps students become, not only college and career ready, but citizen ready. From Inquiry to Action offers practical guidance that leads students to grow as engaged, thoughtful citizens in our communities. We started our conversation on what civic action in schools looks like?

Read Steve's blog here.



Below is the transcript from the podcast:



Steve Zemelman:    In one classroom, high school teacher's kids were thinking about what was important to them, what concerned them, and they decided that the big issue they wanted to address was student date violence. They discovered, doing some research, that there was curriculum about this for high school classes. They looked at it, and being teenagers, they didn't like any of it. You know how teenagers are, they roll their eyes, "Oh, this is dorky." They decided to design their own, and they did. Then they piloted it with some teachers right in their school, and refined it from there. Then they went to the school board, made a presentation about this, and the school board said, "You got to talk to our CEO of schools." They went and they did that, and he agreed to make it an accepted part of the social studies curriculum in the city.

Brett:    How can a student civic engagement lead to classroom engagement?

Steve Zemelman:     When teachers look at a project like this involving civic action, they might wonder how it connects with what they're trying to make happen in the classroom, and engagement is a big part of that. When students are doing these projects, they are doing all kinds of academic work. They're researching the issue, they're researching the governmental agencies that they may be trying to influence, they're writing speeches, they're writing letters, they're finding ways to collaborate with each other, they're disagreeing about issues and finding ways to settle those conflicts. Those are all academic skills, and classroom skills that students have to develop, but they're doing it with a passion because they're concerned about that issue. They are engaged in this work, and yet it's academic work. What I want to say is that engagement in civic action is classroom engagement.

Brett:    How have you seen this work benefit students?

Steve Zemelman:     When we think about benefits for students doing this kind of work, well, classroom engagement, which I just mentioned is one of the benefits, but there are a number of others that are really, really important that make me feel like this kind of classroom work should be going on at least some of the time in classrooms in all schools, because we really need it. What are some of these benefits? Well one is that students become much more involved in school. There is one scene where a visitor was asking a chi...