Disruption through Design: Professional Learning That Empowers and Ignites Change (Principles in Practice)

This teacher-friendly resource guides educators in planning for collaborative inquiry with the goal of disrupting inequitable structures and traditions within classrooms and schools. Disruption through Design provides approaches to designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment that value students' literacies, languages, and lives.

Each chapter focuses on different inquiry groups: how they worked, what teachers learned, and how the collaborative inquiry and design process helped teachers push against deficit-oriented practices in their classrooms and school communities. Building on the work of these groups, this book offers practical tools for engaging in collaborative inquiry and design that leads to deep reflection, needed rejuvenation, and revolution within classroom practice.

Warrington and Fowler-Amato offer a model of professional learning that respects teachers as authorities on classroom practice. This kind of professional learning—described in NCTE's position statement Shifting from Professional Development to Professional Learning: Centering Teacher Empowerment—supports growth and sustains the curiosity and passion of educators.

Principles in Practice series

Amber Warrington began her career as a high school English language arts teacher in San Antonio, Texas. She is now an associate professor of English teaching at Boise State University, where she works with preservice teachers in the English Teaching program and facilitates professional learning with practicing teachers as director of the Boise State Writing Project. Her research explores ways English language arts teachers learn through collaborative inquiry, create dialogic classrooms, and center students' strengths and voices in curriculum, instruction, and assessment. Her work has appeared in English Education, English Journal, Journal of Literacy Research, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. She has been a member of NCTE since 2006.

Michelle Fowler-Amato has worked as a teacher and literacy coach in suburban and urban public schools. She is currently an associate professor of English and the director of English teacher education in Old Dominion University's English department. Fowler-Amato's research interests include adolescent literacy, inquiry-based approaches to teaching and learning, and humanizing pedagogies in the English language arts class. Her work has appeared in English Education, English Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Literacy Research, Literacy Research: Theory, Method, and Practice, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. She has been a member of NCTE since 2006.