This guide introduces I-Charts, a strategy that enables students to generate meaningful questions about a topic and organize their writing.
Inquiry Charts (I-Charts)
Question the Author (QtA)
In this guide, you'll be introduced to a strategy that requires students to challenge their understanding and solidify their knowledge while reading a text.
Exit Slips
This strategy guide introduces the concept of using Exit Slips in the classroom to help students reflect on what they have learned and express what or how they are thinking about the new information. Exit Slips easily incorporate writing into the content area classroom and require students to think critically.
Power Notes
The strategy examined in this Strategy Guide teaches students an outlining technique to help them differentiate between main ideas and details in their reading and writing.
The Literature Circle: Reading Like a Writer
Reading internalizes every aspect of good writing—if you're reading good writing, which most middle school textbooks aren't. Here are criteria and suggestions for good content-area articles and trade nonfiction books.
Alternative Book Reports
This article describes different ways that students can report on books they have read other than the traditional "book report."
Fifty Alternatives to the Book Report
Offers 50 diverse suggestions intended to offer students new ways to think about a piece of literature, new directions to explore, and ways to respond with greater depth to the books they read.
Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing
With full recognition that writing is an increasingly multifaceted activity, we offer several principles that should guide effective teaching practice.
Resolution on Composing with Nonprint Media
This resolution explains what educators can do to work with young people composing nonprint media that can include any combination of visual art, motion (video and film), graphics, text, and sound -- all of which are frequently written and read in nonlinear fashion.
Resolution on Promoting Media Literacy
This resolution discusses that understanding the new media and using them constructively and creatively actually requires developing a new form of literacy and new critical abilities "in reading, listening, viewing, and thinking."
A Call to Action: What We Know About Adolescent Literacy and Ways to Support Teachers in Meeting Students' Needs
This document provides a research-based resource that acknowledges the complexities of reading as a developmental process and addresses the needs of secondary readers and their teachers.
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."
Roots and Branches: A Resource of Native American Literature
This valuable resource book offers teachers an opportunity to learn and to teach about Native American literatures in context. Susag examines the historical and literary contexts that frame the literary work of Native peoples.
Literary Terms: A Practical Glossary
Literary Terms: A Practical Glossary provides up-to-date definitions, drawing on recent developments in literary theory and emphasizing the role of reading practices in the reproduction of literary meanings. Unlike other glossaries, it includes brief activities to help students develop a working knowledge of the concepts.
Risking Intensity: Reading and Writing Poetry with High School Students
Judith Michaels approaches the subject of the self at both the personal and practical levels, opening the world of poetry to her classes through carefully planned strategies.
Nikki Giovanni in the Classroom: "The same ol' danger but a brand new pleasure"
The first volume in the NCTE High School Literature Series, this small, practical book features primary source materials including many of Giovanni's poems reprinted in full, easily adaptable lessons and activities, and a resource section for students and teachers wishing to study Giovanni further.
Great Films and How to Teach Them
Costanzo offers high school and college teachers an updated, expanded edition that contains 80% new material on teaching film, including study guides of 14 new film with relevant ways to engage their students through a medium that students know and love.
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.
Stop Pretending and Think about Plot
Jago offers a review of Freytag's Pyramid and an example of how work with the concept of plot structure positively affected student understanding and writing.
From Sheryl Crow to Homer Simpson: Literature and Composition through Pop Culture
High school teacher Jerome Evans makes popular culture an integral part of his courses. Through analyzing themes in song lyrics, rhetorical devices in essays and advertisements, and psychology in contemporary film, students improve their skills in critical thinking and writing.