Personally and professionally, the author shares experiences with school safety and how the English Language Arts (ELA) classroom may utilize middle grade novels to address gun violence with adolescents. Highlighting five middle grade novels that address school shootings--Katherine Erskine's (2011) "Mockingbird," Emily Barth Isler's…

Communities have their own set of cultural values that make their way into their classrooms and serve as criteria for the labeling of "insider" or "outsider." This article describes how critical empathy can allow the barriers between these constructs to be broken down as students are given the chance not only to listen but to…

Sixth-grade Academic Intervention Services (AIS) students at Wyndemere Middle School (WMS) in Western New York demonstrated a lack of engagement in AIS English Language Arts (ELA) class. In hopes of increasing their engagement, the teacher-researcher implemented a blended learning intervention that incorporated aspects of the flipped classroom…

This paper presents research that examined teacher talk about moderation of English, mathematics and science assessment across Years 4, 6 and 8 as part of a broader inquiry into the use of scaled exemplars to support consistency of teacher judgement. The paper draws on Dorothy E Smith's sociological work, including the process of mapping textual…

Knowledge development, application, and refinement are essential parts of students' reading. One way to observe how students use their knowledge as they read is through talk. Studies routinely indicate that though reading is a social endeavor, teachers spend most of the allotted instructional time talking or using discourse patterns that do not…

The problem addressed in this study is that multicultural literature is not being used consistently to address the needs of the growing diverse population in the local middle school language arts classroom. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore middle school teachers' perceptions of using multicultural literature to teach…

As evidenced by national data, a large proportion of students in middle school, content area classrooms in the United States (U.S.) may be considered developing readers. Evidence-based literacy practices and explicit instructional practices can support these students' literacy development. Yet, research suggests that teachers often miss…

This vignette provides a glimpse into an approach to grammar instruction that sought to value students' voices and linguistic knowledge, position language as flexible and socially situated, and encourage dialogic interactions with language. This approach--a linguistically responsive approach--ultimately sought to disrupt hierarchies typically…

The aims of this qualitative study were (1) to understand the experiences of two middle school English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR) teachers as they planned and implemented critical literacy into a unit in their existing curriculum and (2) to understand the experiences of students as they engaged in a curriculum embedded with critical…

The purpose of this cross-case analysis is to understand how mathematics and English Language Arts (ELA) educators integrated social justice (SJ)-oriented computer science (CS) instruction into middle school classrooms. An integrated curriculum synthesises content and methods from two or more fields to teach curricular concepts and solve complex…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how teachers who teach 6th, 7th, or 8th grade English language arts in a virtual charter school environment describe the gamification process to support student engagement in the classroom. The overarching research question was: How do teachers who teach 6th, 7th, or 8th grade…

The author's eighth-grade ELA curriculum is rich with opportunities for students to bear witness to a variety of experiences. Besides the Holocaust unit, they read "Ghost Boys" by Jewell Parker Rhodes (2018) while exploring police brutality and segregation; "The Giver" by Lois Lowry (1993) while investigating government…

Grammar instruction and its role in writing proficiency have been the subject of long-standing controversy in literacy instruction. While traditional grammar instruction has been proven ineffective, many teachers still implement this approach due to a familiarity with the method or an insecurity in their grammar knowledge. Research instead points…

This article discusses four exemplary activities to highlight imaginative approaches that encourage critical literacy: building a jackdaw, responding to text through multimodal journaling, engaging in dramatic roleplay, and practicing multi-genre writing. Each activity connects imaginative approaches to critical literacy as learners view the world…

Purpose: This study aims to illustrate how one-sixth grade language arts teacher transforms the theory of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) into practice, an effort made visible through classroom discourse. Design/methodology/approach: This classroom discourse inquiry is guided by tools of reconstructive discourse analysis which encourage a…