Media literacy education provides a toolbox for helping direct students' attention to the way we shape information for audience and purpose. The National Association for Media Literacy Education defines the core skills of media literacy as the ability to access, analyze, and evaluate information, as well as the ability to create and act on…

Along with forty-nine other high school students, as the author recounts of their student, Meghan is part of an elective two-week academic writing workshop. Each day begins with a freewrite exercise like this one, designed to help students develop what the workshop directors call "fluency." Like Meghan, many students write prolifically…

Process and product are always in tension. In authentic writing, they can be messy and hard to assess. Because writing is recursive and generative, every word written opens new possibilities. Not only that, but writing is influenced by ability, time allowed, task definition, rhetorical situation, relationship to reading, and helpful thinking…

Shakespeare molded language to meet his needs. Can students learn from his example? In this article, the author suggests studying Shakespeare's creative use of functional shift, spelling, and vocabulary to help students develop greater control of their own writing. The author is advocating that teachers approach Shakespeare as descriptive…

This article describes the assignments the author created to engage preservice teachers in designing instructional materials that befit today's students to help them overcome hurdles sometimes present when learning classic literature. Secondary and middle school English teachers may find these assignments useful as well so their students, too,…

This article describes an instructional lesson the author developed to help students use parody to read and write original poetry. The author begins this article with an introduction to parody and a rationale for using it as an instructional strategy. Then, he describes materials and procedures he used and he shares samples of student writing. He…

In this article, the author focuses on her experiences with genre analysis. This is not a new idea or assignment. But gearing the analysis specifically toward thinking about purpose significantly narrows the focus of a typical "here's what this genre is and who uses it" essay. Genre analysis asks students to think in-depth about one particular…

When students believed they were writing to have their work graded, for the teacher to read it, or to practice for the standardized test, the purpose was too abstract for them to buy into. Furthermore, it was the teacher's purpose and not their own. However, when students were working on revising the same kinds of writing so it could be included…

In teaching a research-writing unit, the author has asked her students to research and write a persuasive speech, a multigenre paper, an I-Search, a historical and comparative connection to literature, a country brochure, and a social criticism essay. While she found benefits and disadvantages in all of these assignments, the author was…

Discusses term paper writing as an academic exercise whose origins are obscure and whose end is self-delusion. (Author/GB)

Rock music's lyrics have excited high school students' interest in poetry. Several poems written by the author's students show that writing poetry can be a means of developing students' awareness of language and of teaching them to express themselves in writing. (JB)

Presents five excerpts from student essays (resulting from extensive in-class coaching and computer lab time) that were based on an article from the December, 1991, issue of "English Journal." (HB)

This issue of "Stepping into the Classroom" reaches the broad ends of the spectrum of experience to showcase two authors who have worked hard to learn from personal experience and translate ideas into practice. Greg Van Nest, a veteran teacher of six years, had gone to many national conferences, but in Nashville in 2006, he came away knowing he…

Findings of the Writing Research Unit at the University of London Institute suggest that writing curricula in British secondary schools do not foster independent thinking or individual personality development. (JH)