Numeracy is a fundamental component of the Australian Curriculum as a General Capability in each subject. Here, we report on an aspect of a larger project that aims to provide insight into how teachers can assist their students to develop a critical orientation to life-related situations through a cross-curricular approach to numeracy.…

In this testimony, the author first describes her qualifications, as well as the lack of relevant qualifications in Common Core's standards writers and in most of the members of Common Core's Validation Committee, on which she served in 2009-2010. The author then details some of the many problems in the 2011 Massachusetts ELA standards, written by…

This study reports on the development of an assessment to measure bilingual adolescents' knowledge of polysemous vocabulary and explores the contribution of polysemous word knowledge to reading comprehension among those students. Spanish-English bilingual students in seventh grade (n = 107) completed a battery of standardized reading and language…

Disciplinary literacy scholars promote text-based instruction in the service of disciplinary inquiry, and scholars of teacher education promote practice-based preparation for teachers. This study brings these scholarly communities into conversation by investigating how practice orientations in teacher education influence novice teachers' literacy…

In this article, we explore data from two studies that demonstrate how inviting teachers to take on the role of codesigners of interventions in social design experiments created opportunities for them to consider their own positionality and privilege as well as negotiate deficit and antideficit discourses underlying and shaping English-language…

This article explores student empowerment in a restructured urban Title I middle school. The study includes data from eight participants in an action research project that involved a critical inquiry unit in an eighth-grade language arts class that asked students, "How are you empowered and disempowered by school?" Findings reveal that…

This case study examines features and processes of a sixth grade teacher (Jane) utilizing text sets as a tool for facilitating critical thinking. Jane's strong vision and student-centered beliefs informed her use of various texts to teach language arts as she worked to address demands of the Common Core State Standards. Text sets promoted multiple…

This research investigates the impact of teaching Shakespeare to below-grade-level readers in an English Language Arts classroom on Chicago's South Side. The students studied are five middle school boys who were observed over a two-year course of study under the same teacher who, after finding success with this method, found herself asking, how is…

The implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has placed increased accountability for outcomes on both students and teachers. To address the current youth literacy crisis in the United States, the CCSS call for students to read increasingly complex informational and literary texts. Since teachers are held accountable for students'…

Desert Elementary is a suburban Phoenix K-5 school. The school has undergone a significant change in its approach to reading instruction due to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) instructional shift of building knowledge through content rich nonfiction. Teachers implemented this shift in their classrooms through a 16-month professional…

Student-led discussion modules are the bread and butter of the language arts classroom; however, teachers are currently limited to very few techniques to choose from, such as large class Socratic Seminars and fish bowls, or small group literature circles. In order to determine which of these discussions are more successful for students, each…

High school graduation is "not yet a reliable indicator of college readiness", (Gaertner & McClarty, 2015, p2). As such, researchers are investigating the use of non-cognitive factors as predictors of college and career readiness (CCR). The College and Career Readiness English Language Arts (ELA) Scale was designed to measure…

The Bechdel test, the author's student Marley explained, is named for the US graphic novelist and cartoonist Alison Bechdel. To pass the test, a work of fiction must contain at least one scene in which two or more women (preferably named characters) discuss something other than a male. Students who read from the canon of works regularly encounter…

The concept of a ready-made block of knowledge does not exist in the Montessori classroom. Instead, the teacher's knowledge and the learning abilities of the child interact. The teacher brings what she or he knows about the world, and the child brings his or her desire to learn more about the world. In this article, a Montessori teacher uses her…

The Common Core State Standard and Next Generation Science Standards emphasize language and literacy across disciplines, requiring shifts in teaching practices and inventive approaches. This case study focuses on the instructional decision-making and activities of one uniquely experienced and qualified seventh-grade science teacher, whose English…