In the current era of educational reform and accountability, co-teaching has emerged as a popular and widely implemented service delivery model for students with special needs. The intent of this inquiry was to examine the roles and responsibilities assumed by the elementary special educator during the practice of co-teaching. Using naturalistic…

The urban inclusive high school classroom is a challenge for both students with disabilities and their teachers. Pressure is intensified when a year long course of study ends in a mandated state examination in English Language Arts, required for student graduation. This article highlights the experiences of two teachers in a New York City…

"Newcomers" are English learners who are new to the United States and arrive with limited or interrupted formal schooling. These students have below-grade-level literacy skills in their home language and do not speak English. Newcomers' arrivals to the middle school and high school classrooms often present a formidable "what to…

This study was conducted to explore the effects of a two-way immersion bilingual program on maintenance/acquisition of Spanish-language proficiency and on reading and mathematics achievement in English over a period of 4 academic years. The researchers used Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) techniques to compare the effects of two different…

The term "literacy" is often used synonymously with reading and writing. However, literacy entails more than reading and writing. Literacy involves communicating with others and includes listening, viewing, following, and reading directions and interacting with friends and colleagues. The literacy skills and abilities are essential for all…

This article explores one element of collaborative practice: the integration of English language learner-focused instruction and discussion in a secondary English methods course. Drawing on the authors' expertise, they examine revisions made to a secondary English methods course to better address the academic and individual needs of diverse…

YouTube, the video sharing website that allows viewers to upload video content ranging from cute dog tricks to rare rock videos, also supports a lively community devoted to the performance of Shakespeare and Shakespearean adaptations. YouTube is also a popular site for student producers of Shakespeare performances, parodies, and other artistic…

This article explores one context in which language arts instruction can be enhanced through digital technologies. It describes how preservice elementary education teachers first investigated aspects of visual literacy and then engaged in digital and traditional multimodal forms of response to historical nonfiction literature. They read,…

This is a case study of an elementary teacher's decision to add multicultural children's books to her curriculum and an analysis of how her ideologies about race shaped the classroom discourse. Although the teacher's stated purpose was to teach the pitfalls of racial stereotypes by encouraging conversations about prejudice, often the classroom…

This report summarizes Austin ISD's 2007 student academic assessment results on the state test,TAKS, in reading/English language arts and mathematics to determine how many students performed in the following scale score ranges: less than 2000, between 2000 and 2099, between 2100 and 2199, and greater than or equal to 2200. Students must make a…

This article addresses the importance of opening space for young people to engage in critical media literacy learning using popular culture texts. Children's background knowledge includes a wide-variety of texts that are often ignored or excluded from school curriculum. The author shows how popular music, for example, can offer powerful…

The author presents three fragments from the art work of a class of American elementary school children to illustrate the imaginative power of children's thought and language.

This book demonstrates how formative assessments, unlike standardized tests, provide the kind of communication between teachers and students that help teachers make instructional decisions to improve student performance. Included are fully developed examples of standards-based formative assessments in reading comprehension, writing, notetaking,…

This paper describes a comprehensive set of studies designed to assess the potential for commercial reading programs to teach reading in science. Specific questions focus on the proportion of selections in the programs that contain science and the amount of science that is in those selections, on the genres in which the science is portrayed, on…

Students and teachers at Hand Middle School in Columbia, South Carolina, were in the midst of a two-year, comprehensive renovation and construction project in which some sections of their 75-year-old, historic building were being renovated and new sections added. When parts of the school were boarded up and oversized machinery first moved onto…