Teachers search for ways to make classroom writing relevant and "real world." This article makes a case for using radio as a framework for the teaching of writing. Using this framework enables students to write strong, specific, and effective pieces and draws the real world into the classroom with the use of smartphones and Web-based…

Keri Franklin has proposed that creating the appropriate social-emotional environment for peer response (or peer conferencing, as she calls it) is a necessary first step. Within the context of her peer response process, though, are there strategies that can be adopted that would further scaffold students' ability to take each other's work…

Graphic novels are an important literary mode with a complex history and practice, and provide struggling readers of all kinds with a visual (but equally rigorous) reading experience. English teachers must determine the criteria for quality examples of this mode to provide the highest quality texts possible to every student. This article uses…

According to the author, as our abilities to combine image and text become more sophisticated and ubiquitous, digital storytelling is a powerful means for sharing those stories. Digital storytelling is a perfect way to remix stories. To present American literature as relevant to students' lives, the author rewrote their curriculum using backwards…

Through a case study of a seventh-grade ELA teacher, this article examines New Literacies pedagogy and more specifically a digital video project amid high-stakes testing pressures that often place limitations on teaching and learning.

Larissa Pahomov teaches students English and Journalism at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school opened its doors to students just seven years ago and was designed to encourage both inquiry and critical pedagogy. To those ends, there is a thematic curriculum for each grade level--for sophomores, it's…

Whether novice or experienced, writers must come to terms with the daunting task of filling up a blank page, or screen, in an effort to produce writing. Student writers are no different. They enter teachers' classes having confronted similar difficulties with discovering what it is they want to say. In seeking to help students, they devote…

All teachers must contend with tough cases on occasion: community events in which there are strong emotions that insert themselves so directly into students' consciousness that they must be dealt with. In this article the two authors, a professor and a graduate student co-teaching pre-service teacher candidates, share their journey through the…

Two teachers of different subject areas (English and mathematics) describe their experiences with a multidisciplinary research paper for senior high school students.

In recent years, professional influences on all sides have pressed the author to put students in the driver's seat, making them more active in their own learning, giving them more voice and choice in their work, and developing skills that will benefit them well beyond the classroom. This article suggests how to introduce literary theory in high…

This article details the authors' success in using youth as a construct to facilitate literary analysis skills among high school students who claimed not to like reading--and who demonstrated difficulty with reading comprehension. The authors provide descriptions of the analysis activities in which the students participated.

This article explores using spoken word poetry and song analysis in the classroom to inspire students to analyze their identities and strive for social justice in their research efforts. Poetry is empowering. It can show students how people express themselves, push them to consider their own identities, and inspire them to seek social change.…

An English teacher and a math teacher collaborating to improve practices in classroom discussion develop a problem-solving method that steers students away from seeking simple solutions and into an understanding of the complexity and nature of problems.

Nudged by scholars to make their practice public and to "put [themselves] out there" by participating in professional conversations online, many English teachers are turning to the Web to enhance their professional development. This article draws from a qualitative study investigating five English teachers' experiences participating…

Sharon Creech's book, "Love That Dog," is the story of a young poet named Jack, a good teacher, and a dog. Using free verse, Jack describes how he becomes a writer in dated journal entries. He is just an average kid, like so many of the kids in one's classes. But Jack has an excellent English teacher in Miss Stretchberry. She assigns freewriting…