The middle grades are an exciting time for adolescents to explore, learn, and collaborate with one another (National Middle School Association, 2010). By incorporating an academic social network as part of the classroom experience, collaboration and active learning take on new forms, and a transformation from passive learning to active learning…

As states and school districts grapple with how to teach the skills outlined in the new common standards, two foundations have announced a partnership aimed at crafting complete, online curricula for those standards in mathematics and English/language arts that span nearly every year of a child's precollegiate education. The announcement last…

The authors conducted an experimental study to examine the effects of collaborative strategic reading and metacognitive strategic learning on the reading comprehension of students in seventh- and eighth-grade English/language arts classes in two sites (Texas, Colorado) and in three school districts. Students were randomly assigned to classes and…

The authors of the new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy believe that college and career-ready students who meet the standards in that document exhibit a number of "capacities of the literate individual." One of these is the capacity "to understand other perspectives and cultures" through reading classic and…

When artists are inspired to travel in Europe to study art and history of the Western world, Italy is a good place to start. With its ancient architecture, rich cultural heritage, and superb works of art, Italy has been the quintessential center of Western art history for centuries. It was the good fortune of Alabama-based artist and teacher…

In this article, we explore how we live among students and teachers as a/r/tographers and how we become creatively immersed in the wholeness of the classroom experience as a result. This is in contrast to our initial intentions of using ethnographic techniques and qualitative methods. As we began our project, it became apparent that another lens…

This article represents one portion of a systematic examination of a narrative inquiry project designed for pre-service English education students. It offers a narrative writing and a reflective writing of one student, Lisa, to demonstrate how the project worked in her efforts to investigate the nature of students, teaching and students' learning.…

In this article, the authors describe how Jenae, a seventh-grade English language arts teacher, modified I-Charts (Hoffman, 1992; Randall, 1996) and I-Search papers (Macrorie, 1988) to support the needs of her adolescent English Language Learners (ELLs). They highlight how she improved upon two timeless instructional practices by integrating…

As more English learners (ELs) are included in mainstream content classrooms at the secondary level, the need to understand how teachers collaborate to meet the particular instructional needs of ELs is essential. This paper presents findings from a qualitative case study that investigated the collaborative work that engaged a group of literacy…

Using eight waves of longitudinal data on a statewide kindergarten cohort of English learners (ELs), I examined ELs' tenure in language-learning programs and their academic performance following reclassification as fluent English proficient. I employed discrete-time survival analysis to estimate the average time to and grade of reclassification…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether middle school teacher attitudes on personal teaching efficacy and responsive teaching and their descriptions of their principal's leadership behaviors in the areas of leader social relationships, leadership/goal setting, and collaboration for learning differ for high- and low-achieving Grade 8…

This technical report provides detailed information regarding the technical, statistical, and measurement attributes of the New York State Testing Program (NYSTP) for the Grades 3-8 Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) and Mathematics 2014 Operational Tests. This report includes information about test content and test development, item (i.e.,…

The growing availability of data linking students to classroom teachers has made it possible to estimate the contribution teachers make to student achievement. While there is a growing consensus that teacher quality is important and current evaluation systems are inadequate, many have expressed concerns over the use of value-added measures (VAMs)…

This practitioner-research study investigated the effect critical literacy has on content area preservice teachers' abilities (N = 14) to perceive the sociocultural influences in text. The study further investigated how content area pre-service teachers engage in critical stance during situated reading practices that centered on discussions of…

Widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the United States has resulted in an unprecedented set of national secondary school writing standards that shift responsibility for writing instruction across content areas. As secondary school teachers grapple with these new demands, this article proposes that WAC can serve as a key…