An effective mode of reflective practice and reflexivity is through personal professional narrative and story exploration. All professional and personal experience is naturally storied; telling or writing stories are prime human ways of understanding, communicating and remembering. Narratives of vital or key areas of professional experience can be…

Discusses how James Gray, founder of the Bay Area Writing Project and later the National Writing Project, began with a simple idea--successful teachers are the best teachers of teachers. Describes how James Gray laid a foundation for what has become a national network with 175 sites across the nation, providing a professional home for thousands of…

In this article, I examine the potential roles of reflective writing in ESOL teachers' learning and professional renewal. I demonstrate its importance with insights from aspects of a study on the accounts ESOL teachers construct when they do write about teaching.

This book offers successful classroom practices that encourage students to learn purposefully and constructively by reflecting on their own learning processes and by making connections between what they read (whether verbal or visual texts) and the lives they lead. Extending from middle and high school through college composition and English…

This book is an autobiographical effort to understand life as a person and as a high school English teacher, and how those two lives have intertwined. The text examines how the author, trained in certain ways, thinks of herself as a professional person. In addition to the subject of the teaching of reading and writing, the author explores how her…

This book for graduate teaching assistants (TAs) presents 15 essays regarding the place of teaching in the lives of those teaching at the university level, and the responsibilities of teachers at all points in their careers. The book offers practical classroom strategies as well as selections from current research on teaching and learning. The 15…

The causes of reading failure are numerous and complex. If instruction provided by the school is ineffective or insufficient, even some otherwise capable learners will have difficulty learning to read. Improving literacy instruction through professional development is an ongoing process involving all of the members of a schoolwide literacy team in…

This volume presents 64 abstracts of keynote and parallel paper presentations of the Irish National Academy for Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning's (NAIRTL) conference on the theme of flexible learning. The Flexible Learning conference was a joint initiative by NAIRTL and the Learning Innovation Network. The keynote presentations can…