Sensitive to the increased importance of valuing diversity and diverse points of view since 9/11, this article describes activities through which ESL students contribute new knowledge to their classes while simultaneously improving their English language skills.
Sharing Stories and Developing Multiple Perspectives in Post-9/11 Classrooms
I-Search in the Age of Information
Middle school teacher Huntington Lyman takes a fresh look at the I-Search research method and shows how it can be modified to provide an effective project for middle school students.
Ethics as a Form of Critical and Rhetorical Inquiry in the Writing Classroom
What can improve students' engagement in persuasive writing? A strong ethical dilemma and strategies for developing intelligent responses.
The Great Gatsby in the Classroom: Searching for the American Dream
Veteran high school English teacher David Dowling demonstrates how teachers can help students connect The Great Gatsby to the value systems of the twenty-first century, offering active reading and thinking strategies designed to enhance higher-level thinking and personal responses to fiction.
To Kill a Mockingbird in the Classroom: Walking in Someone Else's Shoes
This book examines ways of engaging students as they study Harper Lee's novel. Included are collaborative learning, discussion, writing, and inquiry-based projects as well as activities related to the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.
Writing about Literature, 2nd ed., Revised and Updated
This book is intended to help middle and secondary school English language arts teachers integrate literature study and composition instruction.
Authentic Assessments for the English Classroom
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.
Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading: Lessons for Teachers of Literature
Deborah Appleman dismantles the traditional divide between secondary teachers of literature and teachers of reading and offers a variety of practical ways to teach reading within the context of literature classrooms.
Reading Shakespeare with Young Adults
Dakin explores different methods for getting students engaged--and excited--about Shakespeare's plays as they learn to construct meaning from the texts' sixteenth-century language and connect it to their twenty-first-century lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.