A Teacher's Guide to Instructional Resistance

Overcoming Curricular Challenges to Do What's Best for Your Students

Paul Sutton, Paul S. Sutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040627174
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

Standardized curricula and rigid approaches to teaching don't engage students and don't allow teachers to bring their true expertise to the classroom. But there is another path. Learn how to engage in instructional resistance to bring joy, purposefulness, and rigor back into your classrooms. In this empowering book, Paul S. Sutton shows how you can use your instructional expertise and skills to better serve students by resisting wrong-headed curricular mandates imposed upon you. He offers an instructional resistance framework that gives you a way to respond to the practices and policies you know are not in the best interest of your students. You'll learn that you have more power than you think to question and critique the curricular mandates required by your district and school and to make small, actionable, yet powerful changes to your practice that will change your classroom culture and bring more fulfilling teaching and more engaged learning. Throughout, there are case studies, examples, tools, and strategies applicable to all grade levels so you can start to become the teacher you imagined yourself to be, starting the very next day. A Teacher's Guide to Instructional Resistance is inherently empowering and hopeful. This book will leave you feeling ready to leverage your creative genius in service of all of your students.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 How the Education System Became What It Is
• 2 Learning From the Redemptive Moxie of Excellent Teachers
• 3 The “Who” of Teaching: Building the Capacity to Be a Better Teacher
• 4 The “How” of Teaching: Taking the First Step
• 5 The “How” of Teaching: What the Research Says
• 6 The “What” of Teaching: Resisting the Madness to Better Serve Students
• 7 Moving From Where We Are Now to Better