Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) lay out a comprehensive vision for the way that learning progressions (or other "road maps") might be used to inform and coordinate formative and summative purposes of assessment. As Black, Wilson, and others have been arguing for over a decade, the effective use of formative assessment has great potential to…

Textbooks and grammar worksheets do not adequately convey to students how readers or listeners are shaped by the language of the writer. The best way to help students understand the emphasis of a dash or another device is to see one used during a suspenseful moment in a dramatic selection. It is up to the teacher to select dramatic works that…

Drawing on and reexamining theories on gender and literacy, derived from research performed between 1974 and 2002, this qualitative study explored the gender assumptions and expectations of 19 preservice and practicing secondary language arts teachers in a graduate level adolescent literature course. The theoretical framework was structured around…

Thomas Wartenberg offers his book as a guide that will provide elementary school teachers what they need to facilitate philosophical discussions with children. My concerns are centered on the nature and role of philosophical discussion, the level of philosophical acumen needed for facilitating such discussion, and the role of character development…

This short commentary offers praise for Tom Wartenberg's book "Big Ideas for Little Kids" and raises questions about who is best qualified to lead a philosophy discussion with children, and how we are to assess the benefits of doing philosophy with children.

Reader-response has become one of the most influential literary theories to inform the pedagogies of middle and secondary English classrooms. However, many English and literacy educators have begun to advocate for more critical and culturally responsive versions of reader-response pedagogies, arguing that teachers move beyond valuing students'…

Grounded in theory and best-practices research, this practical text provides teachers with 40 strategies for using fiction and non-fiction trade books to teach in five key content areas: language arts and reading, social studies, mathematics, science, and the arts. Each strategy provides everything a teacher needs to get started: a classroom…

In this article we share our experiences of using poems in teacher-training courses where the students are predominantly second-language learners. We describe how we tried to help learners engage with a creative text through its language and meaning. We share our experiences of helping to facilitate the open expression of opinions and feelings in…

In this high-accountability era--one in which there is an expanding movement to condemn teachers for the failures of their schools--teachers teach students who believe writing is primarily an act of complying to a prompt, likely for a state accountability assessment or the troubling 25-minute essay that constitutes less than half of the writing…

This article is centrally focused on teaching biography to second grade children in new and intriguing ways. In this article, the authors discuss the use of a multimodal integrated visual art and literacy curriculum in student investigations, interpretations, and writing of biography. Section one describes the wider project of conceptualizing an…

The course the author teaches in Cultural Diversity is a requirement for pre-service teachers seeking a Preliminary Teaching Credential as well as for in-service teachers who have returned to earn the California Teachers of English Learners (CTEL) Certificate. As part of this course the author requires a literature analysis assignment. In this…

This article describes a project conducted with Year 12 English students. It was based on the model of "Teaching as Inquiry" (Ministry of Education, 2007) and aimed to develop students' self-efficacy in relation to their literature-response essay writing. Self-efficacy was measured using Bandura's (2006) self-efficacy scale and an…

The purpose of this article is to describe the assessment-driven instruction that facilitated third graders' increased understanding of informational texts, as revealed in their written responses to texts during one school year. The key instructional practices included making transparent for students what it means to synthesize, engaging students…

"Not reading," even for many good students, has become a mode of operation with respect to book-length texts assigned in school. Many students enter secondary and postsecondary literature classes "intending" to "not read" the books teachers assign. More students than teachers want to admit do not complete assigned reading, choosing instead to…

The first part of the present paper deals with the analysis of the literary theory and linguistic background of the reader-response method, respectively with the presentation of the process of composition and its psychological components. The reader-response textual interpretation method can take several different approaches of literary theory,…