The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of a collaborative inquiry group of middle school ELA teachers who were utilizing the Appreciative Inquiry (AI) framework to create a virtual library of e-books, examine students' reading motivation data, and implement classroom practices intended to increase student reading value, motivation,…

National, state, and local governmental authorities have researched and reported the impacts of poverty on academic performance for multiple decades, providing guidance, legislation, accountability, equal access initiatives, and continuous monitoring for educators to address the ongoing dilemma. However, poverty performance achievement gaps are…

Extant research indicates culturally relevant literature (CRL) is linked to increased reading comprehension and interest in reading for Latinx students as well as other student groups. Current research also shows CRL can support home literacy instruction, facilitate writing instruction, foster sociopolitical awareness, underpin behavior…

Purpose: In this paper, the authors engage with embodied critical literacies through an exploration of the possibilities provided by the use of improvisational comedy (improv) in the classroom. The purpose of this paper is to extend understandings of critical literacy to consider how embodied critical literacy may be transformative for both…

The focus of this qualitative study is upon 15 Grade 12 students situated in an English Communications (ECM) classroom in rural Nova Scotia and the impact a daily classroom circle had upon their academic engagement. ECM is intended for students who may require further support to develop their skills as readers, writers, and language users as they…

The authors of this article call upon classroom memories to demonstrate the harm of the standardized testing apparatus in the English Language Arts (ELA) classroom. Goal setting under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has led to targeted school intervention based on metrics, and many states have chosen to double down on standardized ELA and…

Policy makers, school practitioners, and scholars around the world have been searching for better school improvement models. The purpose of this study was to understand how an instrument we developed, Orientation to School Renewal, can be used to predict school-level academic achievement. We used the instrument to predict the academic performance…

Despite the importance of analytic text-based writing, relatively little is known about how to teach to this important skill. A persistent barrier to conducting research that would provide insight on best practices for teaching this form of writing is a lack of outcome measures that assess students' analytic text-based writing development and that…

In this study, we examine evidence of transfer from reading instruction to students' learning of language arts and historical content as demonstrated by their independent writing and growth in background knowledge. We taught a unit in a sixth-grade language arts classroom in which students learned about design elements of graphic novels (e.g.,…

Across the U.S., educators face a common challenge: How can we help all students become strong readers and writers? In the author's state of Tennessee, many educators believe they have a reading crisis. Two-thirds of 3rd graders do not read and write on grade level as measured by the statewide assessment (Tennessee Department of Education, 2019a).…

A major component of reading in subject areas is motivation to engage with text in different and specific ways. Yet, scant research captures fluctuations in adolescents' daily reading motivation in subject areas or across diverse reading activities: important information for supporting discipline-specific reading performance. Thus, this study…

This study explores how two elementary teachers (first and fifth grades) integrated social studies content and skills throughout their school day. More specifically, we describe and explain their social studies instruction in terms of integration as it reflects fractured, healthy, and stealthy integration (Hinde, 2015). As researchers, we spent…

This study was prompted by the Arizona Department of Education's (ADE) interest in learning more about the progress of English learner students toward English proficiency in the early grades. The study examined, for the 2013/14 kindergarten cohort in Arizona, the English language proficiency of non-native English speaker students and their English…

Teacher turnover has adverse consequences for student achievement and imposes large financial costs for schools. Some have argued that high-stakes testing may lower teachers' satisfaction with their jobs and could be a major contributor to teacher attrition. This study uses data on individual students and teachers from Georgia's statewide…

This study contributes to the paucity of research on transformative approaches to civic education in elementary school classrooms. In this dissertation, I explore how culturally and linguistically diverse fourth graders and their teacher in a Spanish-English two-way bilingual education (TWBE) classroom engaged in transformative civic education.…