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Who Gets to Be Considered Capable? Rethinking Intelligence and Ability
Redefining capability as a flexible quality rather than a fixed standard of speed or independence is essential for building inclusive
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Safe Spaces or Brave Spaces? Rethinking Inclusion for LGBTQ+ Students
The conversation around “safe spaces” versus “brave spaces” often sounds more theoretical than lived. It frames inclusion as a choice between comfort and growth, as if students must sacrifice one to gain the other.
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Am I Even Good at This?
When I started grad school, I didn’t realize how quickly self-doubt could take root in a room full of writers.
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6 Effective Ways to Build Attention and Boost Student Participation
Any educator can attest to the mounting challenge of maintaining student attention in the classroom. Students’ exposure to digital media from a very young age has both diminished their capacity to pay attention and led them to crave interactions with devices during times when their use is not essential.
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What to Do When the Words Won’t Come
There are days when the blank page feels like a locked door. As a writer and educator, I’ve watched students and colleagues wrestle with that silence, and I’ve lived through it myself. Over the years, I’ve learned to stop treating writer’s block like a fault and start treating it like a sign: something in your process, body, or mindset needs attention.
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Engaging Students Through Creative Exercises: 5 Practical Strategies
In Part 1, we looked at creative exercises that lay the groundwork for student engagement by building trust and encouraging collaboration. But once that initial connection is formed, the question becomes: How do we keep that creative energy alive?
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Creative Expression for Mental Health: How Writing, Drawing, and Dancing Can Help You Heal
We often assume that understanding our emotions means being able to explain them. If we can name what we feel and trace it to a cause, we think the work is done. But many emotions do not begin as thoughts. They appear first as physical sensations, fleeting images, or a general unease that resists neat explanation.
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Beyond Buzzwords: What Inclusion Really Looks Like in Everyday Classrooms
When I visit classrooms, I often step into a scene that looks ordinary: desks in rows or clusters, posters on the wall, a teacher greeting students as they enter.
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The Stories We Tell Ourselves: How Journaling Helps Us Make Sense of Our Emotions
Most of us don’t struggle to feel; we struggle to understand what we feel. Emotions arrive uninvited and imprecise: irritation that masks exhaustion, confidence that lasts only until comparison enters the room, sadness that looks like distraction.
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How Writers Develop a Unique Voice That Captivates Readers
One of the most elusive yet essential qualities of great writing is voice. It’s what makes you lean into a story, recognize a favorite author after only a few lines, or feel as though the words on the page are speaking directly to you.
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7 Trends in Literacy Over the Last Decade That Everyone Should Know
When I talk with teachers, parents, and young writers, I keep returning to the same idea: literacy today is both more fragile and more generative than it was ten years ago. The last decade has been a time of significant shifts – some hopeful, some concerning – and understanding these trends helps us make more informed choices in classrooms and communities.
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Mental health in intellectual disability is real, not less
Mental health is often discussed as if it belongs to a certain kind of person. Someone who can articulate their feelings clearly. Someone who can describe anxiety, name sadness, or explain what feels off. But this way of thinking leaves out an entire group of people whose emotional lives are just as real, even if they are expressed differently.
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The Quiet Importance of Predictability for People With Intellectual Disabilities
Predictability is often misunderstood as rigidity. In conversations about intellectual disability, routine and structure are sometimes framed as limitations, signs that a person is overly dependent on sameness or unable to adapt. But predictability is not simply about preference.
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