Describes the author's experience teaching poetry to a fourth-grade class, and how an inspired moment from one student (improvising a poem about an imagined hairstyle of poet Federico Garcia Lorca) led the entire class on a journey of inspiration. Looks at the route to that place of "inspired rightness." (SR)

Describes activities of college students in a "Poets in Schools" program that brings college students together with students in elementary and secondary schools. Describes how the students devised poetry teaching exercises, and describes three of those exercises (a multimedia approach, using photos and postcards, and poems like trees).…

Describes the Six-Trait Writing Model, developed to aid in student writing and the analyses of K-12 compositions. Defines these six traits as: ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, and conventions. Discusses how student writing is scored according to these traits, how teachers can implement the model, and presents research…

Describes how a teacher and her grades one through three children made poetry come alive and serve as an authentic part of their lives. Describes the factors underlying authentic classroom instruction, and notes how poetry moved out from lessons and even school time to become something that will continue to be with many of these children…

Features five poems written by children in five different classrooms in central Illinois. Describes how each class approached their writing assignments in response the attacks of September 11, 2001. (SG)

Cauley's books about snakes demonstrate intentional and interesting decisions by a beginning writer. The conclusion states that learning to choose topics for writing in thoughtful ways is an important part of the curriculum in writing workshop.

The author argues that the new journal "Young Scholars in Writing: Undergraduate Research in Writing and Rhetoric" offers access to student writing outside of the pedagogical apparatus that has historically accompanied the publication of such writing, and in the process challenges composition's standard practice of citing students by first name…

The authors describe their experience using a learner-centered approach to turn learner writing into booklets. When students write about their own lives, they can focus on the language they need to express their ideas. Interaction increases because interest is high. Near beginners can create fact sheets about themselves, and more advanced students…

Adding a strong conclusion can alter a cookbook lab into an inquiry lab by challenging the student to defend relevant data and clearly communicate his or her findings. A well-organized scoring guide makes it easier for students to understand what is involved in writing a strong conclusion. Examples of student writing that are accompanied with the…

This issue of "Stepping into the Classroom" reaches the broad ends of the spectrum of experience to showcase two authors who have worked hard to learn from personal experience and translate ideas into practice. Greg Van Nest, a veteran teacher of six years, had gone to many national conferences, but in Nashville in 2006, he came away knowing he…

Seniors submitted and revised essays within ePortfolios for evaluation by high school faculty and university first-year writing instructors. The project also examined differences between high school and college teachers' responses and effects on students' assumptions about the writing expected and valued in college. Results suggest techniques…

Trickster tales, with their teachings on how to behave in the world, are a powerful means for transmitting social knowledge and cultural mores to children. In this study we compared two approaches to teaching fourth-grade students to write trickster tales. Although both instructional methods incorporated aspects of the writing process approach,…

This study explored the practices of two high school teachers of U.S. history and their students' performance on evidence-based history essays over 7 months. Data include pre- and posttest essays, interviews, observations, teacher feedback, assignments, and readings. Qualitative and quantitative comparisons of 42 students' work show that one class…

Reading several documents from the early history of Francis W. Parker School and an essay by John Dewey entitled "The Need for a Philosophy of Education" helps the author's students gain some precision in defining what otherwise remain rather loosely held opinions about the core values of the school. For most of the students, these…

Initially an assignment for a library science class, this paper presents various definitions of the current creative writing phenomenon called "sudden fiction" (very short short stories with concise character sketches, and terse tales limited in length to several pages). The paper includes: (1) a list of well regarded sudden fiction…