Fishman Prize Essays

How do effective teachers motivate and engage students in rigorous academic content? That’s the question the 2012 Fishman Prize winners chose to address in Unlocking Student Effort: How Five Irreplaceable Teachers Engage, Challenge and Inspire Students to Excellence. Download the paper »

It is the first paper in the Fishman Prize Series, an annual collection of essays that highlight specific skills and strategies the Fishman Prize winners use to achieve extraordinary results. You will hear from practitioners in their own voices, writing about their own classrooms.

Individually, they provide a glimpse into five incredible classrooms where students are achieving at high levels. Taken collectively, they offer a range of approaches and strategies that all teachers can use to help build and sustain student investment in their learning. Essays include:

• The First Five: Shira Fishman builds a sense of urgency and community during the first five minutes of each class period.
   
• All the World's Their Stage: Whitney Henderson helps students draw connections between academic content and their futures.
   
• Crush Lusher: Jamie Irish rallies his students around the challenge of outperforming their peers at a more affluent, selective enrollment school just two miles away.
   
• You Are Here: Katie Lyons engages her students in rigorous historical material by connecting it to their own lives and the rich, diverse neighborhood around them.
   
• Here We Grow Again: Leslie Ross leads her students to success in her rigorous biology course by building a powerful sense of team spirit in her classroom.