Describes one teacher's methods for introducing to secondary English students the concepts of improvisation, experimentation, and innovation. Discusses numerous techniques for fostering such skills when working with William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." (HB)

Describes the involvement of a high school English teacher in an isolated and poor county in West Virginia with the West Virginia Writing Project and how she was able to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones. (SR)

Finds an overall drop in reading attitudes across the upper elementary school years in three of the four schools examined. Reveals few significant relationships between reading attitudes and teacher-reported enrichment activities. Notes that activities that fit with a traditional, direct instruction approach to teaching reading correlated…

Advocates incorporating the study of ethics into HIV/AIDS education programs. Offers a list of five ethical dilemmas concerning HIV/AIDS for small group classroom discussion, and outlines a five-class-period approach to the topic. (SR)

Describes an exercise in which students demonstrate what they have learned by working in groups to find incorrect grammar in newspaper writing. (SR)

Describes a technique in which students sample a text (looking for clues about the story and raising questions), as a way to involve more students in the text of the story. (SR)

Presents an initial minicollaboration exercise with which to begin collaborative projects. Notes that students discuss how to respond to a range of comments and concerns of prior students to collaboration, thus shifting learning and discovery to students from the very first step. (SR)

Describes the rationale, advantages, and teaching procedures of the "talk through," a postreading strategy that helps high school and college students go beyond a simple retelling to transform, reorganize, and elaborate information and monitor their own understanding. (SR)

Suggests implementing a pen pal program using students in the same school or from a school in the same district as a way to encourage written communication among elementary school students. (HTH)

Offers descriptions of three class activities involving collaboration between basic composition and freshman composition classes, involving magazine production and peer response. (SR)

Describes several classrooms where children learn to use their literacy to take part in the governance of their communities. Demonstrates how reading and writing can be brought together around issues of civics in the elementary and middle school grades. (SR)

Describes a game that provides opportunities for students to share their thoughts about the key features of stories and their interconnections while also emphasizing story content. (SR)

Offers six brief articles, each presenting a particular class activity for high school journalism students, focusing on feature writing, getting the whole picture, news writing, an observation test, sights and sounds, and a reporting exercise. (SR)

Explores how teachers can help their students look for meaning in the visual media. Presents the theory that students object to looking for meaning in certain forms of visual media, because they dislike having their world complicated with unnecessary interpretive searching. Discusses the results of several class exercises adapted from David…

A high school teacher describes a class project which replaced customary research papers. The high school seniors prepared a medieval banquet, a project which involved intensive research. Useful research sources on costumes, decorations, food, and general information for such a project are listed. (DB)