In It Together

Dr. Debbie Zacarian, founder of Zacarian & Associates, provides professional development, strategic planning, and technical assistance for K-16 educators of culturally and linguistically diverse populations. She has served as an expert consultant for school districts, universities, associations, and organizations including the Massachusetts Parent Information Resource Center and Federation for Children with Special Needs. Debbie has worked with numerous state and local education agencies and written the language assistance programming policies for many rural, suburban, and urban districts. Debbie served on the faculty of University of Massachusetts-Amherst where she co-wrote and was the co-principal investigator of a National Professional Development grant initiative supporting the professional preparation of educators of multilingual learners. Debbie also designed and taught courses for pre- and in-service administrators and teachers on culturally responsive teaching and supervision practices, multilingual development, and ethnographic research. In addition, she served as a program director at the Collaborative for Educational Services where she provided professional development for thousands of educators of multilingual students and partnered with Fitchburg State University in co-writing and enacting a National Professional Development initiative that supported STEM education. Debbie also directed the Amherst Public Schools bilingual and English learner programming where she and the district received state and national honors. The author of more than 100 publications, her most recent professional books include: Beyond Crises: Overcoming Linguistic and Cultural Inequities in Communities. Schools and Classrooms; Responsive Schooling for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students; Teaching to Empower: taking action to foster student agency, self-confidence, and collaboration; and Teaching to Strengths: Supporting Students living with Trauma, Violence and Chronic Stress. Michael Silverstone has been a full-time elementary teacher in Massachusetts since 1998. With Debbie Zacarian, he co-authored the Grade 2 chapter in Academic Language in Diverse Classrooms: Promoting Content and Language Learning, Mathematics, Grades K-2 (Corwin). His essay recounting his discovery of the vital importance of maintaining professional autonomy while fostering relationships with students, families and colleagues-in spite of all the pressures to standardize classroom practice-is the closing teacher-essay in the anthology Why We Teach Now, edited by Sonia Nieto (Teacher's College Press). Silverstone is also the author of a number of Young Adult non-fiction books including Rigoberta Menchu: Defending Human Rights in Guatemala and Winona LaDuke: Restoring Land and Culture in Native America (The Feminist Press at the City University of NY). He is a Teacher Consultant with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project of the National Writing Project. http://www.umass.edu/wmwp/

1. What It Means to Be "In It Together" in Education 2. An Involved Classroom Community 3. Infusing the Assets of Students and Families Into Classroom Learning 4. Preparing for Classroom Community 5. The Academic Learning Benefits of Being "In It Together" 6. Using Classroom Events to Empower Students and Families 7. Widening the Circle Beyond the Classroom: Service Learning 8. Using Learning Partnerships in Professional Development: Applying the Ideas Index

"Building meaningful relationships in education can be difficult, particularly when the parties involved are different from one another in identity, experience, and other ways. As a result, although in principle collaborations and partnerships in education are universally lauded, in practice they are often ignored. What we need are examples of partnerships that work. In it Together, by Debbie Zacarian and Michael Silverstone, suggests productive ways to work with, learn from, and form authentic relationships with diverse communities. Combining their abundant experience in classrooms and schools, and using examples from caring teachers in diverse classrooms, the authors demonstrate what it means to really be "in it together." Teachers, administrators, and everyone who cares about the future of education in a diverse society will benefit from the strategies they suggest." -- Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita