Describes how a teacher used a computer lab to encourage her students to explore cultural issues and racial newspaper coverage that often probed highly sensitive and potentially explosive concerns. (PRA)

Explains how using the term "Family English" to identify nonstandard English with adults in developmental classes at the junior college level keeps communications open without negatively labeling their language and without producing hostility. (SR)

Maintains that teachers must encourage the lifetime reading habit at school in independent reading. Discusses several ways to do so, including cluttering up the classroom with reading materials, providing time for reading, and encouraging the reading habit throughout the year. (SR)

Offers five steps to prompt students' engagement with a short story and their enhanced understanding as well as enjoyment of writing. Lists short stories useful for this activity. (SR)

Strategies to help students transition to a new school year include emphasizing that everyone is in it together, discussing everyone's progress, visiting next year's classrooms, meeting students individually, discussing change, maintaining an open-door policy, reviewing the year's plan book, making memory books, and planning to visit old teachers.…

Challenges the concept of mathematical certainty and questions whether it is a useful concept for elementary and secondary mathematics curriculum. Encourages teachers to bring this issue into the classroom and ask students to think about it critically. (HB)

Describes how network television can be used to teach visual literacy in the composition classroom. Claims that television's "look" is pervasive and rhetorically powerful. Analyzes the program "Twin Peaks" as it relates to the medium's codes. Suggests how the program might be used to teach students about these codes. (HB)

Argues that a primary goal of foreign language instruction should be acquainting students with foreign culture. Discusses how language teachers might facilitate student encounters with foreign cultures. Presents an eight-step process for developing reading skills in a foreign language. (HB)

Defines metacognition and claims that it is a central aspect of students' steadily improving reading ability. Shows how teachers can teach their students useful metacognitive reading strategies. (HB)

Suggests four exercises to undertake prior to the actual reading and study of William Shakespeare's "The Tempest" in high school English classes. (HB)

Describes a California high school English class's creation of various authentic learning activities to bring Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov" to life. For any activity to be perceived as genuine, students must be able to apply what they are learning to their lives; there must be a goal worthy of students' and teachers' commitment and…

Describes multimedia boxes and how they can be used in classrooms. Suggests ways teachers might begin a multimedia box and different ideas for using it. (HB)

It is argued that, although materials are an important form of support to language classroom activities, they also constitute a constraint that can undermine the value of those activities for the processes of learning. (three references) (LB)

Describes a class activity in which children write "news stories" concerning what happened to them over the weekend. Notes that the activity is enjoyable and effective in facilitating literacy. (RS)

Offers observations from a literature-rich kindergarten classroom to reveal that children who are presented with models and opportunities to dramatize literature will engage spontaneously in dramatic story reenactments. (SR)