Encouraging inquiry into more reflective practice, this book invites English teachers to examine their ways of thinking, their relationship to the subject of English, their standards for good teaching, their place in the professional community, and their attitude toward time. The book offers guidelines for: helping students choose topics that are important to them; prompting initial responses to literature and moving toward polished pieces of writing; using writing as a tool for thinking and inquiring; understanding what makes for poor student research writing and how to improve it; and planning curriculums that focus on story in fiction and memoir. Before and after each long chapter is a short essay, a meditation on time. Chapters in the book are: (1) Choosing My Teaching; (2) Creating Literate Environments in Secondary School Literacy Classrooms; (3) Writers Notebooks: Tools for Thinking and Living; (4) Moving from Private Thoughts to Performance; (5) Corridors of Meaning: Classroom Arrangements for Becoming Better Readers; (6) A Place in the Conversation: Writing Literature in Response to Literature; (7) A Curriculum for English: Seasons of Inquiry into Making Things; (8) Fiction: Building a World of Possibilities; (9) Making Something of Our Lives: Reading and Writing Memoir; (10) Making Sense of Nonfiction; (11) More than Magic: Elements of Craft in the Teaching of Literacy; and (12) The Extracurricular Life of an English Teacher. (Contains references.) (RS)