Joanna Dolgin, Kim Kelly, and Sarvenaz Zelkha offer real-world examples, sample student work, step-by-step instructions, and handouts to help teachers incorporate authentic forms of assessment into the middle and high school curriculum.
Authentic Assessments for the English Classroom
What Works in Writing Instruction: Research and Practices
Through teacher-friendly language and classroom examples, Deborah Dean takes a close look at effective, research-based practices for writing instruction.
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.
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.
Technology That Powers Up Learning
By designing lessons to activate prior knowledge and linking these activities to reading and writing, teachers found that students were more engaged, that they learned more material more quickly, and that they more willingly incorporated reading into their lives.
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.
Finding the Thread: Character, Setting, and Theme
An annotated bibliography of books that exemplify the plot elements, character, setting, and theme. Includes guidelines on how to do a book talk.
Exploring the Past through Multigenre Writing
Research comes alive when students explore a range of alternate genres instead of writing the traditional research report.
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.
Technology in the Language Arts classroom: Is It Worth the Trouble?
Suggests the authentic audience found on the Internet has a profound effect on the quality of student writing in all grades, and that the key to successful technology projects is integrating them into the curriculum so that computers are a means, not an end. Offers ideas for classroom activities and projects using stand-alone computers, and using computers with Internet access.
Peek, Peak, Pique: Using Homophones to Teach Vocabulary (and Spelling!)
Argues that regular homophone practice enhances vocabulary knowledge, spelling skills, pronunciation ability, and overall reading proficiency. Describes how card games played with decks of homophones helped to accomplish these things. Notes particular benefits of homophone games to ESL students, and outlines key advantages of using the games.
Spelling: From Invention to Strategies
Veteran educator Howard Miller shares a set of strategies that can propel middle school writers (and "inventive" spellers) into the role of being responsible and strategic in this Voices from the Middle article.
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.
Talking with Teen Librarians
When it comes to motivating and inspiring teens to read, teen librarians have a lot to teach us. You'll hear about the approaches two teen librarians take to their work with teen readers, ways they go about sharing and promoting new titles, plus a short list of their favorite books for teens.