With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.
Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing
Guideline on The Students' Right to Read
The current edition of The Students' Right to Read is an adaptation and updating of the original Council statement, including "Citizen's Request for Reconsideration of a Work."
Planning for Inquiry: It's Not an Oxymoron!
Planning for Inquiry shows you how to get an inquiry-based curriculum started, how to keep it going, and how to do so while remaining accountable to mandated curricula, standards, and programs.
Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
This document is a code of best practices that helps educators using media literacy concepts and techniques to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use.
Being and Becoming: Multilingual Writers' Practices
This study examines the writing practices taken on and negotiated by multilingual class members within two multiage elementary classrooms.
New Visions for Linking Literature and Mathematics
David and Phyllis Whitin offer K–6 teachers a wealth of ideas for integrating literature and mathematics.
Be Fabulous: The Reading Teacher's Guide to Reclaiming Your Happiness in the Classroom
Scoggin merges her straight-talking blogger persona, Mrs. Mimi, with her years of research to help you rediscover who you are and redefine the type of literacy teacher you want to become. At the heart of this book is teacher happiness and empowerment—reconnect with your inner fabulous to give the best possible literacy instruction to your students.
Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies
This position on Multimodal Literacies is a summary statement developed by the Multimodal Literacies Issue Management Team of the NCTE Executive Committee.
Let's Go to the Movies: Rethinking the Role of Film in the Elementary Classroom
Argues that elementary language-arts teachers should expand their definition of "text" to include film, a valuable instructional material. Notes that today's elementary students come to class with a great deal of knowledge about films--prior experiences which teachers can tap into. Discusses the application to film of reader-response theories.
Different Texts, Different Emergent Writing Forms
Examines young children's ability to vary the forms of emergent writing as they wrote a story, a shopping list, and a letter to a friend at three different times during the school year. Finds that children apply their emergent knowledge about written language differently. Indicates a considerable mismatch between written products and knowledge of genre characteristics.
Nonfiction Inquiry: Using Real Reading and Writing to Explore the World
Nonfiction is the genre most likely to spur children's passion and wonder for learning. This article discusses way to motivate children to read nonfiction.
Language and Literacy: The Poetry Connection
Offers a conceptual framework for building language awareness through the reading of poetry, encouraging children to reflect on language in interesting and powerful ways. Provides an instructional model for constructing literature-based experiences in the classroom.
Standards for the English Language Arts
Standards for the English Language Arts presents a vision of literacy education that encompasses the use of print, oral, and visual language and addresses six interrelated English language arts: reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and visually representing.
Code-Switching: Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms
Wheeler and Swords show K–6 teachers how to use code-switching and contrastive analysis to help students use prior knowledge to translate vernacular English into Standard English.
Grammar Alive!: A Guide for Teachers
NCTE's Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar provides this much-needed resource for teachers who wonder what to do about grammar—how to teach it, how to apply it, how to learn what they themselves were never taught.
Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom
Katie Wood Ray explains in practical terms the theoretical underpinnings of how elementary and middle school students learn to write from their reading.
The Writing Workshop: Working through the Hard Parts (And They're All Hard Parts)
A practical, comprehensive, and illuminating guide for both new and experienced teachers that confronts the challenges of the writing workshop head-on.
The Day Jimmy's Boa Taught Cause and Effect
This lesson introduces the concept of cause and effect with Trinka Hakes Noble's books about Jimmy and his boa constrictor.
Creative Problem-Solving with Ezra Jack Keats
Using books by Ezra Jack Keats as inspiration, students explore problems and solutions through read-alouds, discussion, and an interactive bulletin board.