MY BOOKS
Getting Schooled On Resistance (2024)
Education & Teaching
ACADEMIC
Getting Schooled on Resistance examines the experience of one school’s attempt to push back on the deficit model of education and represents the overall story of urban school reform. In this book, readers will find stories and critical analysis of what happens to students, teachers and schools when their ideas and thoughts are undervalued.
First published under the title Untangling Urban Middle School Reform: Clashing Agendas for Literacy Standards and Student Success in 2016, Getting Schooled on Resistance is timely and relevant for educators, policy makers and pre-service teachers today. We are arguing the same “urban school reform” narrative we’ve been arguing since the early 80’s. We have moved from chalkboards to Smart Boards and Chromebooks, but the same narratives of students of poverty and failure exist. It’s no wonder students rely so heavily on AI for their writing when their own ideas are undervalued or marked “wrong.”
Urbanski’s up-close and unflinching analysis illuminates how rigid accountability structures shift power away from the teachers and administrators who know the students best and in so doing perpetuate the “bad student” moniker, all too often becoming a self-fulling prophecy.
Making Middle School: Cultivating Critical Literacy and Interdisciplinary Learning in Maker Spaces (2020)
by Steve Fulton (Author), Cynthia Urbanksi (Author)
ACADEMIC
Making Middle School is the story of eighth-grade English teacher Steve Fulton and science teacher Tiffany Green’s explorations of the intersections between critical literacy and science through maker spaces alongside their students.
Steve and Tiffany, with thinking partner Cindy Urbanski, use the idea of make to center student learning in their classrooms as well as to democratize learning, back-loading English and science standards while front-loading the current focus on STEAM.
Making—following one’s own desire to create—is based on principles of connected learning, where students work in community to challenge themselves, to be creative, and to wonder about their world. Making represents a pathway directed by the learner and allowed to unfold organically, without a scripted route or destination. By looking up close at the real work of teachers and students, Fulton and Urbanski illustrate the rich and real applications of a make-based approach in today’s middle school classrooms.
Using the Workshop Approach in the High School English Classroom: Modeling Effective Writing, Reading, and Thinking Strategies for Student Success (2015)
Education & Teaching
ACADEMIC
As a trencher, do you find that preparing for standardized tests interferes with teaching advanced thinking, reading, and writing skills in a meaningful way? Do you want to balance test preparation with more creative activities?
Success in school and beyond depends on one’s ability to read fluently, write coherently, and think critically. This handbook uses the workshop model for exponentially increasing adolescents’ abilities in these three key areas.
This practical guide addresses the daily running and practice of a workshop-based classroom, using research and the author’s own experiences to illustrate how to establish a workshop that:
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Fosters lasting learning while reinforcing the skills needed for standardized tests
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Teaches audience and purpose as a vehicle to style and structure
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Provides a supportive and lively environment in which students are comfortable enough to take risks and share original ideas
Try Urbanski’s approach to teaching literacy analysis and mentoring student writers, and discover just how rewarding the workshop experience can be!
Thinking Out Loud on Paper: The Student Daybook as a Tool to Foster Learning (2008)
by Lil Brannon (Author), Sally Griffin (Author), Karen Haag (Author), Anthony Iannone (Author), Cynthia Urbanski (Author), Shana Woodward (Author)
ACADEMIC
Not to be confused with a daily-planner daybook that organizes time, the student daybook helps organize thoughts-across time, across subject areas. It helps learners build lasting connections between reflection and application, in-school content and out-of-school life, even last week's lesson and this week's. In other words, it's not just a place to jot down ideas, but a place where real learning happens. Thinking Out Loud on Paper helps you understand the power of the student daybook and offers ready-to-use lessons to make the most of it. Fostering deeper, more critical thinking, offering a place to process content and new ideas, and reinforcing the importance of students' own thoughts are just some of the many important reasons to implement the daybook. Thinking Out Loud on Paper goes well beyond rationales to provide ready-to-use lessons that help you get started and succeed, including classroom-tested, research-based daybook strategies for:
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helping students get started with daybooks
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organizing for a variety of teaching and learning styles
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sustaining daybooks through meaningful invitations and instruction
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evaluating and assessing student thinking
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using computers as part of your teaching
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conducting teacher research.
Meanwhile, Theory Connection Boxes, broken out by grade level, connect the theory behind student daybooks directly to effective classroom practices specified in the book, while abundant examples from real daybooks show you what kind of results you and your students can achieve. Teach students that their thoughts matter and that their thinking is as important as their responses. Read Thinking Out Loud on Paper and the advice of the many teachers in it who have raised expectations of how deeply kids can learn. You'll soon see the student daybook is an effective way to support your teaching by giving students a space to consider what they've learned in personal, authentic ways that create new, stronger connections than ever.
Evolving from the Roots: The Magic in the Work (2024)
by Cindy Urbanski (Author)
LITERARY NONFICTION
When we are rooted, and open, those tools come to us, like magic. Except it’s not. It’s the work.
Cindy spent a lifetime bulldozing her way through and working hard at, well, everything. That is, except for the work that matters: the work of mental health. In a collection of essays chronicling her continued journey, she shares snippets of her life growing up on a recreational farm next door to her grandparents and then as a mother, wife, academic, and runner turned yogi. Each story on her journey tells how she has been evolving over the past decade. She just needed the courage to tend and water some roots that never left her, even when she neglected them for a time.
Reflecting on her 50 years of toggling between living life at breakneck speeds to finally surrendering to what she calls the real work, Evolving at the Roots shares how Cindy is learning to slow down, build her toolbox, and find the magic that exists in a rooted, continuously evolving life. Cindy hopes others can find some peace in her words and magic in their lives as they reach down deep and find the courage to do their own work, whatever that looks like.
Unveiling the Secrets: An Encyclopedia by Women for Women (and Those Who Love Them) (2023)
by Cindy Urbanski (Author), Shana Hartman (Editor)
LITERARY NONFICTION
Readers can expect nothing short of magic in this new collection of stories, essays, poems, and musings written by women, for women. Those who identify as women, and the people who love them, will find real life depictions about many things often gone unspoken or only in secret, veiled ways in the lives of women. This collection of their stories aims to pull back the curtain and shine a light because the experiences of women matter. The authors hope you toggle seamlessly from a good knowing cry to a laugh out loud good time as you journey with us in our effort at Unveiling the Secrets. Editors and co-authors, Shana and Cindy, are excited to share the following amazing contributing authors... Kristin Bowen, Taylor Edwards, Melisa Graham, Amanda Soesbee Kent, Mackenzie Urbanski Menon, Rachel C. Patterson, Tonya Reid, Karen Taylor.
Capturing the In-Between (2022)
by Shana V. Hartman (Author), Taylor Edwards (Author), Halinka Prevett (Author), Wendy Mersch (Author), Danielle Radke-Doucette (Author), Jana Salvatore (Author), Karen Taylor (Author), Laura Wieck (Author), Cindy Urbanski (Author)
LITERARY NONFICTION
If you are anything like the authors of this collaborative book, you've got goals in life. You are highly-ambitious, and you aren't here to play small. In fact, you've been working on "getting there" -- achieving that goal, following that dream, finding that path -- your whole life, it seems. The old adage "it's not about the destination, it's about the journey" rings true, yet doesn't quite capture what you have experienced.The complexity of experiencing what is happening now as you are simultaneously on your way to what is next is what these group of powerful women call "the in-between." We offer a collection of stories and experiences about how we have navigated the in-between that can, let's face it, feel like wading through a swamp. Slow and messy. In Capturing the In-Between, we lay it all out there, and even go so far as to claim that in life there really is only the in-between, so we better make the most of it!