The Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts were a part of a reformation of the nation's reading standards. The demands for higher standards were due to the general public and Federal legislators request for higher student achievement. The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to explore the teachers' life experiences, thoughts,…

Since 2006, Boston Public Schools (BPS) has been implementing expanded learning time (ELT) in schools to improve student outcomes, close opportunity and achievement gaps, and enhance preparation and planning opportunities for staff to support these efforts. In 2015, the district and the Boston Teachers Union agreed to add 40 minutes to the school…

In this article, the author uses lesson reflection as a way to consider ethical issues that accompany teaching with texts that include death. More specifically, the article examines the relationship between moral education and analytic or skills-based education.

Overland Park, Kansas, may seem like an unlikely setting for using the "New Yorker." While it is not the "Wizard of Oz" Kansas -- more suburban sprawl than expansive wheat fields -- the ethos is far from the cosmopolitan aesthetic of New York City. The "New Yorker" covers can raise questions that may lead to relevant…

Although vocabulary acquisition remains a critical to literacy development, teachers infrequently devote classroom time to vocabulary exercises. In this article, the author demonstrates the use of "vocabutoons" as an instructional activity which draws upon students' multiple literacies, in particular, visual literacy, in order to foster…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how a collaborative narrative inquiry focused on cultivating critical English Language Arts (ELA) pedagogies supported teacher agency, or "the capacity of actors to critically shape their own responsiveness to problematic situations" (Emirbayer and Mische, 1998, p. 971). Design/methodology/approach:…

This manuscript examines how national reading policies in the United States shape specific kinds of civic identities for K-12 students. We engage in a thematic discourse analysis of two contemporary national policy documents--the "Common Core State Standards" ("CCSS") and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)…

Critics of standards-based reform often cite an accountability policy environment that disproportionately affects teachers compared with principals and district officials. We directly examine this disproportionality. In our three study states of Texas, Ohio, and Kentucky, we use survey analysis to understand how policy environments for district…

The Stanford Educational Data Archive (SEDA) is the first data set to allow comparisons of district academic achievement and growth from Grades 3 to 8 across the United States, shining a light on the distribution of educational opportunities. This study describes a convergent validity analysis of the SEDA growth estimates in mathematics and…

This paper reports findings from a study examining pre-service teachers' perceptions of Indigeneity and literacy in a literacy teacher education course. In 2015, the new British Columbia K-9 curriculum was implemented with a focus on integrating Indigenous perspectives into the curriculum in thoughtful and meaningful ways. This includes an…

Teachers' use of video modeling has been established as an evidence-based practice for teaching students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Augmented reality (AR) applications can be used as tools to provide trigger-based, video-modeled instructional supports to students with ASD. The use of AR in this way may help teachers implement…

Reading comprehension models are being implemented in content-area settings to boost reading achievement. Yet, little research explores how such models are incorporated into teachers' daily instructional practice. The authors used extended observations and interviews to examine the integration of Collaborative Strategic Reading (CSR), an…

Within the last decade, two large reading reform efforts have directed state and local state school reading instruction, the Reading First Initiative (2002) and the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (2010). These initiatives have heavily shaped literacy teaching and learning with a focus on disparity reduction in literacy…

Curriculum Associates' i-Ready is an adaptive diagnostic and individualized instructional tool that has been used in M-DCPS in the last few years. In addition, Curriculum Associates provides the District with results of their predictive model, which uses the students' outcomes on the Fall and Winter i-Ready diagnostic testing as well as the…

Critics of standards-based reform often cite an accountability policy environment that disproportionately affects teachers compared with principals and district officials. We directly examine this disproportionality. In our three study states of Texas, Ohio, and Kentucky, we use survey analysis to understand how policy environments for district…