Almost twenty years ago, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published "Principles and Standards for School Mathematics" (2000), which recommended that teachers should incorporate more writing into their math lessons, claiming that writing helps students "consolidate their thinking" (p. 402) by causing them…

Local teachers have been working with their colleagues and math coach for years on ensuring that oral discourse during their mathematics classes has them acting as a facilitator and allowing students themselves to make sense of the mathematics. Specifically, their discussions are aimed at having students reason mathematically because discourse and…

Understanding how to address current trends and issues in literacy education is more important than ever, as local, state, national and international agendas are increasingly recognizing literacy as a foundation for success in all disciplines in education. To bridge that gap in understanding, this book showcases hot topics in literacy, providing…

Writing about mathematics holds a wealth of benefits for students. When students are given opportunities to write in math class, it helps develop mathematical thinking and language, encourages self-reflection, and provides a better way to organize ideas. Many teachers incorporate journaling and other types of reflective writing into their…

Every teacher knows the challenge of trying to engage reluctant readers and struggling writers--students whose typical response to a writing prompt is a few sentence fragments scribbled on a sheet of paper followed by an elaborate shrug of the shoulders. The best way to engage less confident readers and writers is to give them something powerful…

The body of literature on a Writing-to-Learn (WTL) approach in math courses offers up a variety of assignment types from which to choose. However, few of these articles provide empirical evidence on the ways these writing assignments contribute to students' learning. This mixed-methods study, conducted at the University of New Mexico, a…

A writing-across-the-curriculum and ethics component is presented for a second-semester, physical chemistry course. The activity involves introducing ethical issues pertinent to scientists. Students are asked to read additional material, participate in discussions, and write essays and a paper on an ethical issue. The writing and discussion…

Sociological imagination is a quality of mind that cannot be adopted by simply teaching students its discursive assumptions. Rather, it is a disposition, in competition with other forms of sensibility, which can be acquired only when it is practiced. Adhering to this important pedagogical assumption, students were assigned to write their…

The "Teaching Academic Content and Literacy to English Learners in Elementary and Middle School" practice guide was developed by the What Works Clearinghouse™ (WWC) in conjunction with an expert panel to support teachers in providing language instruction. The practice guide provides teachers with guidelines and examples of ways to…

Beginning in third grade, Pennsylvania students are required to take the Pennsylvania State Standardized Assessment (PSSA), which presents multiple-choice mathematics questions and open-ended mathematics problems. Consistent with the Communication Standard of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, while solving the open-ended problems,…

The book introduces readers in the often-overlooked math-related fields to the ideas of writing-to-learn (WTL) and writing in the disciplines (WID). It offers a guide to the pedagogy of writing in the mathematical sciences, and gives theoretically grounded means by which writing can be used to help undergraduate students to understand mathematical…

Writing is the ability to compose text effectively for different purposes and audiences. When many of us reflect on our own school experiences, we recall writing in English and history classes, but not in mathematics. Math classes previously relied on skill-building and conceptual understanding activities. Today, teachers are realizing that…

Students learn how to write in English class, but they seem shocked when they are told that they can put those skills to work in science class too, since writing is a huge part of science to communicate ideas, results, conclusions, and opinions to other scientists. The author of this article, a middle school science teacher, describes how he uses…

Throughout the decades, writing has been recognized as a process that helps learners to think more deeply about ideas and information they encounter through reading, listening, viewing, and physically experiencing the world around them. "Discovery writing," the type of writing over which students have some control of the format, topic, purpose,…

One of the best ways to enrich students' social studies experience is to include assignments in which students interact with social studies content and skills. In this article, the author explains how teachers can use writing exercises to encourage such interaction. She describes the following writing activities: (1) acrostics; (2) haiku; (3)…