Describes how, after studying the Holocaust and other human-rights issues in their eighth-grade language-arts classes, students felt compelled to create a permanent memorial and reminder. Discusses how the project unfolded from finding and shaping an idea, collecting stories from around the nation, crafting the mosaic and the flower garden, and…

Offers researchers' perspectives for online publication. Shows how to establish criteria for validating these sites as valuable resources in student-centered teaching and learning. Gives reasons why middle school writers should publish on the web. Presents a chart of 18 websites with a description and a list of key factors regarding the websites.…

Describes a series of activities to help middle school students develop an artist's vision and then convey that vision through poetry. Describes how lessons progress from looking at concrete objects to observations of settings and characters, gradually adding memory and imagination to direct observation, and finishing with revision. Notes that…

Describes a six-week poetry writing workshop for an eighth-grade class. Discusses getting started, two weeks of immersion in reading poetry, students writing their own poetry, creating a community of poets in the classroom, evaluation, students' poetry, and what the teacher learned. Notes that students gained a much richer understanding of poetry.…

Using children's picture books, Deborah Dean provided frameworks for student research papers that avoided the pitfalls leading to voiceless an encyclopedic writing. Research guide sheets; class analysis of text organization, sentence variety, stylistic choices; and peer review all contribute to interesting final papers. (Contains 2 figures.)

Argues that children are as deep as the ocean, with secret places inside of them waiting to be opened. Notes that it is powerful for students to learn they can make sense of the world through words, and describes inviting them into poetry as they read poetry, create poetry packets, and write and revise poems. (SR)

Describes why and what happened when a teacher changed from viewing English teaching as a value-neutral act to teaching what matters to her. Relates what she expects from the reading and writing workshop and how raising her own voice in terms of her passions and what she values has strengthened students' voices. (SR)

Describes how the author's 6 middle school students living in a village in the Yukon, 100 miles off the road system just below the arctic circle, enthusiastically wrote stories or poems about their lives. The students shared their works via an online electronic conferencing system with students from the unimaginably different landscape of the…

"Zooming in" with a camera lens led students in Joan Berger's class to enrich their writing exponentially. Through class discussion of body language, along with the use of worksheets (provided), role-playing, modeling, and conferencing, one aspect of lively writing became a part of their writing repertoire. (Contains 5 figures.)

Outlines the limitations of letter grades and the problems with giving percentage points. Discusses authentic evaluation and the author's daily process of evaluation with her low-reading students as they engage daily in reflecting, rethinking, selecting, and deciding. (SR)

Reports on a study of stories written by eighth graders in three very different schools, stories carrying powerful messages about how girls understand their place in the world. Finds that, in one set of stories, females control their lives only as long as they are "good," and in the other set, autonomous female protagonists fail (often for no…