Explores what writing teachers want to know about the ways cultural realities, such as gender, influence literary practices, such as writing autobiographical stories for composition classes. Argues that what they want to know affects how they read gender narratives and that reversing the terms would make a difference in their reading practices.…

Defines portfolios in terms of their uses in university writing courses. Summarizes teachers' experiences in implementing portfolios in departments that have not adopted portfolios. Reviews common complaints and questions writing teachers have about portfolios. Describes and gives examples of student portfolios. (RS)

Describes how a teachers uses children's literature to immerse students in the living past. Presents students' poems and excerpts from student journals to document students' reactions to using historical fiction in the classroom. (RS)

Argues that teachers can learn from today's highly media-literate journalism students, and illustrates this by discussing papers from a first-year journalism class dealing with media bias and sensationalism caused by profit-seeking. (SR)

Discusses the use of lists and classification in poetry throughout history. Gives examples of lists in verse from Elizabethan to modern times. Offers some basic types and functions of the "list poem." Relates the lists poems of a fourth grade class. (PRA)

Considers risk taking as an important skill of accomplished writers. Argues that teachers often fail to notice when their students take risks in their writing. Encourages writing teachers to take such student risks into account to foster risk taking in their students' writing. (HB)

Defines four principles (goodwill building, course of action, bottom line, and most important first) that pose rhetorical problems for students making the transition from academic to business writing. Presents a problem-solving case to demonstrate reader-based business writing and provides samples of students' writing that illustrate the…

Suggests that children must be allowed their voices through writing. Discusses how four eighth-grade students turned life experiences into meaningful writing for the classroom. (RS)

Considers different fifth-grade students' transformations through expressing themselves with poetry. Claims the content of children's writing suggests a complete revision of standard educational ideas about who the children are, what they know, how they think, and how much they can learn if teachers only know how to tap into their brilliance. (SC)

Argues that silence has a remarkable presence, and that hearing silence is about stopping and not doing, letting the sounds of the world come to you. Describes ways the author has worked with elementary school students, asking them to think about and write about silence. Includes poems about silence. (SR)

Argues that comparison and contrast are an essential part of review writing for high school newspapers. Offers examples and discusses their use in reviews of movies, albums, restaurants, books, concerts, and more. Notes the importance of including audience and reviewer reaction, of grading, and of a good lead and conclusion. (SR)

Describes a group pioneering the process of "professional" publication of students' writing called Chapbooks.com. Discusses the author's experience with Chapbooks.com and three other "testimonies" from different schools. Concludes with an appendix of frequently asked questions about the website. (SC)

In this paper, we analyse teachers' judgments of students' written texts. We document how teachers use evidence in ways that depend both on their knowledge of the students and on the assessment framework they need to use. We analyse teachers' judgments by contrasting the structures of assessments made using teachers' normal classroom judgment…

Responding to student writing is one of the most challenging aspects of the writing instructor's job, and it is certainly the most time-consuming. Preparing future teachers to respond to L2 writing thus becomes an important aspect of any pre-service training course. In this paper, the author describes her own approach to training writing…

This paper presents examples of rubrics that can be used in the assessment of the acquisition of generic skills in accounting education. A rubric is a matrix containing the various factors of an assignment along one dimension (rows) and descriptors of the qualitative levels of accomplishment along the other dimension (columns). A rubric can…