Shifts in generations from Millennials to Generation Z have brought changes to today's classroom. In turn, these changes indicate the need for reform and innovation in education. If the goal for education remains to put contributing members into society, then educators must search for the most effective ways to prepare students to enter society…

Each fall at harvest time, young students in the authors' part of the Midwest visit apple orchards to learn more about the life cycle of plants. This tradition is one part of a larger unit centered on apples, integrating life science with language arts and social studies. The authors partnered with kindergarten teachers at several schools to…

Science is a great time to focus on language development in the elementary classroom. Participation in science requires that students use language to present claims, engage in argumentation, and partake in science and engineering process skills. Over the years, the authors have noted the importance of vocabulary in students' ability to participate…

This paper foregrounds sociocultural learning theory and dialogic pedagogy to describe how instructors at two universities, one in the Midwest and one in the mid-South, used a web-based social annotation tool to spark conversations among English language arts methods students who crossed geographic boundaries and invited all students to share…

In this article, we explore how the reading and writing of poetry can be a form of critical hope within secondary English teacher education courses, and across our experiences as English teachers. We begin by discussing a particular moment from our secondary English teacher education course, where one of our teacher interns prompted us to respond…

The purpose of this nonexperimental, quantitative study was to determine if there is a significant correlation among teacher-assigned grades (TAG), district checkpoint scores (CP), and student scale-scores on TNReady tests. The focus was on 1,445 seventh and eighth grade students who were enrolled at a middle school in northeast Tennessee during…

Pared down standards, according to ASCD author Mike Schmoker, are the cure to the Common Core. In this provocative article, Schmoker describes how the Common Core literacy standards have largely been a "disaster"--their tangled implementation "an impossible profusion of grade-by-grade minutiae." To "right the ship of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways assemblaging communities work to support, hinder or disrupt literacy pedagogy in one English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Through an expanded understanding of community based on the concept of assemblage, this paper discusses the ways in which one teacher's critical literacies…

When the number of charter schools in a given area increases, are students who remain in traditional public schools worse off? This is a claim often made by opponents of school choice; gains made by students in charter schools, they say, come at the expense of students left behind. There is scant evidence to support this view in the existing…

Is there a way of reading literature that is specialized for teaching? Research into the teaching of mathematics has identified a specialized form of content knowledge (SCK, Ball, Thames, & Phelps, 2008) that is significantly linked to student learning (Hill, Ball, & Rowan, 2005). Despite the centrality of literature to the teaching of…

Over the past decade, large-scale testing programs have employed technology-enhanced items (TEI) to improve the fidelity with which an item measures a targeted construct. This paper presents findings from a review of released TEIs employed by large-scale testing programs worldwide. Analyses examine the prevalence with which different types of TEIs…

This study used a novel approach to examine the link between gender ability stereotype endorsement and academic interests by examining not only stereotypes people hold "within" the domains of mathematics and language arts, but also "between" them. Grade 6 and 8 students (285 males, 363 females) reported their degree of…

This study looks at the reflections on successes and challenges of an English language arts (ELA) veteran teacher on teaching writing to two newcomer English language learners (ELLs). The research questions are as follows: (1) What does the veteran ELA teacher identify as challenges and successes in her reflections on teaching writing to two…

On a daily basis, PreK-12 teachers make countless decisions about how to best meet their students' needs through assessment and instruction. However, their ability to justify these decisions is not frequently used as a resource for accountability measures or the evaluation of educational programs. The research presented here, which draws from a…

Social media has provided innovative ways for teachers to engage students in the learning process but has created a challenge for teachers to incorporate these applications in a manner that is both meaningful to the learning objectives and acceptable to their administration. While social media in education has been the focus of many studies,…