Through teacher-friendly language and classroom examples, Deborah Dean takes a close look at effective, research-based practices for writing instruction.
What Works in Writing Instruction: Research and Practices
Reading for Learning: Using Discipline-Based Texts to Build Content Knowledge
Heather Lattimer provides practical, classroom-tested approaches to helping students access and critically respond to content-based texts.
What Is "College-Level" Writing? Volume 2: Assignments, Readings, and Student Writing Samples
Edited by Patrick Sullivan, Howard Tinberg, and Sheridan Blau, this sequel to What Is "College-Level" Writing? (2006) highlights the practical aspects of teaching writing.
Teaching YA Lit through Differentiated Instruction
Authors Susan L. Groenke and Lisa Scherff offer suggestions for incorporating YA lit into the high school curriculum.
Reading & Writing & Teens: A Parent's Guide to Adolescent Literacy
Offering advice from a host of experts in adolescent literacy, this book helps answer real questions from parents across the country about how to best support their teens as readers and writers.
Walking the Talk: Examining Privilege and Race in a Ninth-Grade Classroom
The authors describe their struggles and eventual success with students in constructing a "counternarrative to colormuteness and colorblindness"—the self-imposed student segregation and silencing of voice.
Tim O'Brien in the Classroom: "This too is true: Stories can save us"
As part of the NCTE High School Literature Series, Tim O'Brien in the Classroom focuses on opportunities for classroom discussion and writing assignments, including lessons, open-ended prompts, and student writing samples.
Violent Red, Ogre Green, and Delicious White: Expanding Meaning Potential through Media
This article reports on the meaning potential of daily access to drawing/writing media for widening and deepening meaning construction.
A Failure of the Imagination
This article discusses the imaginative activities and assignments that teachers often assign that violate the text around which the lesson is focused and that mislead students about its meaning.
Adolescents and Digital Literacies: Learning Alongside Our Students
This book isn't about technology. It's about the teaching practices that technology enables. This book addresses the ways in which teachers and students work together to navigate continuous change and what it means to read, write, view, listen, and communicate in the twenty-first century.
Multigenre, Multiple Intelligences, and Transcendentalism
Colleen A. Ruggieri offers a multigenre, mulltiple intelligences unit on transcendentalism complete with suggested texts and an assessment plan.
Exploring the Past through Multigenre Writing
Research comes alive when students explore a range of alternate genres instead of writing the traditional research report.
Re-envisioning Research
Describes a research paper in the author's high school English classroom which connected to the lives and interests of students, who delved into community problems with as much rigor (and using many types of research as traditional essays exploring arcane philosophical questions). Describes creating a context for exploration, and students' final projects.
Inquiry at the Window: The Year of the Birds
This science inquiry in a fourth-grade classroom affirms the importance of observation, questioning, reading, and writing to the inquiry process.
Analyzing Grammar Rants: An Alternative to Traditional Grammar Instruction
Kenneth Lindblom and Patricia A. Dunn teach language awareness and use through published complaints about the teaching of grammar. Students are able to recognize issues of race and class that determine acceptable usage and learn the importance of audience in their own language use.
Ghosts and Fear in Language Arts
Describes how an English teacher uses ghost stories in his classroom to further students' interest in and understanding of epics. Presents a short unit in which all the class work focuses on scary kinds of things.
Codeswitching: Tools of Language and Culture Transform the Dialectally Diverse Classroom
This article shows how to affirm and draw on the dialect diversity of students to foster the learning of Standard English.
Nonfiction Roundup
With each annual crop of new nonfiction, teens have the opportunity to discover and explore new disciplinary worlds. Tune in to hear about an array of recently-published nonfiction titles that will engage teens in learning about history, science, economics, and medicine. You'll hear about junk food and advertising, the atomic bomb and civil rights, bird watching and volcanoes – books written in a variety of formats for a variety of teen readers.
Teens and Trauma
Young adult literature about teens and trauma provides a window into mental illness and the toll it takes on young people. Stories of teens who are dealing with depression, anger, or the wish to die can be difficult to read, but they are important. They give voice to a particular kind of suffering, and they help us develop a deeper understanding of emotional pain. Just as important, they show us how people survive that pain and begin the process of healing. Tune in to hear about six new novels that focus on teens, trauma, and mental illness.