The authors document work in a fifth-grade classroom investigating informational texts. Students investigated a range of informational texts and their potential forms. In the spirit of challenging a given curriculum and conventional understandings of informational texts, texts in the Science Comics series were invited into this learning space.…

Critics of ethics education suggest that students need to learn about contextual pressures of workplace ethical decisions and develop skills to handle them. Thus, instructors are often challenged to integrate an ethics unit into organizational behavior courses in ways that complement, rather than duplicate, what may have been covered in their…

During a 10-week classroom-based study, 20 fourth grade students participated in a number of interdependent activities that focused on developing their visual meaning-making skills and competencies. As well as reading, responding in writing to and discussing a selection of picturebooks, graphic novels, and magazines, the students created graphic…

Peter Gray explains how his Year 12 students came to research and write a resource on the history of Zambia, for history teachers "in" Zambia. The construction of the resource stretched the Year 12 students in new ways: the Internet was useless and there were no easy digests in A-Level textbooks to get them started. They would have to…

Many students view equations as a series of variables and operators into which numbers should be plugged rather than as representative of a physical process. To solve a problem they may simply look for an equation with the correct variables and assume it meets their needs, rather than selecting an equation that represents the appropriate physical…

This column shares innovative lesson ideas grounded in current literature or action research. Two books are discussed: Lesley Atwater Kahle's book "Cut Word Story," which allows students to become individually engrossed in words and grammar within stories that they create; and Anete Vasquez's "Literary Analysis 101", which gives teachers a simple,…

This article looks at Year 9 (age 13) ESL learners in a secondary school in Hong Kong producing--with minimal input and support from their teachers--their own story books, these being the final task outcome in a series of lessons focusing on creativity. Over a period of two months, as an integral part of their ESL lessons, groups of students…

To stimulate students to learn through creative participation and to make literature a live experience, an experimental film making project was conducted with freshmen at Bimidji State College during the 1969-70 term. The first step was to introduce film-making to the students. This was accomplished through viewing and analyzing brief…

This book is an anthology of unedited verse and prose written by 14- and 15-year-old students. The book is intended for teachers in training, for their tutors, and for all teachers of English. The verses are classified as undirected and directed poems about nature, places, war, the Egyptian Tomb, up and back again, and people. The prose is…

Discusses a unit designed to develop students' insights into the poetic experience by comparing poetry and photography; includes several student written poems. (DD)

Freshman composition calls for a teaching technique in which the content of the course is primarily student-created materials. Since by definition a writer is one who writes, a freshman writing course should simulate the professional writing process and also provide an outlet for the product. The steps in the writing process are psychological…

An approach to teaching descriptive writing and its values are discussed. Benefits derived from a descriptive writing unit are said to be the following: (1) Descriptive writing is fun; (2) It enables the instructor to demonstrate that the first word that pops into the writer's mind is often not the best one; (3) There is no easier way in which to…