The author began a project - the Technology Reflection Project - in May of 2019. As the last few weeks of tests and projects approached, her students needed to focus on academics and finish strong. As summer approached, she wanted to reduce her screen time, get outside, connect with her family, and form good habits. The author though, "Why…

Like parents, educators should prepare their students to do without them. To achieve this they must understand two concepts they hear about in the world of education: multiple intelligences and media literacy. Research on ways people learn and demonstrate knowledge shows that both are as diverse as the physiques of the students. Some of them learn…

Students' online communications provide an engaging platform for discussing audience, purpose, and voice. Digitalk allows teens to experiment, to make decisions that are tied to audience, purpose, and voice. If teens have the opportunity to step back from their digital writing, to see value in the choices they make, and to see themselves as…

This article introduces a new framework for teaching adolescents to read: Connected Reading. By sharing instructional practices and describing digital tools, the authors argue that a mindful, social model of connected reading is a crucial part of any research activity. As teacher-researchers, the authors led teens through lessons on digital…

Two decades have passed since Frank Smith's "Joining the Literacy Club: Further Essays into Education," and educators can make two relatively safe comments: (1) Smith's call for recognizing and honoring the social nature of literacy growth has been largely overshadowed by pursuits of accountability, and (2) Smith is right: Literacy "learning is…

English language arts classrooms are especially rich sites for both explicit and implicit collaborations among those who inhabit those spaces. In these venues, Bakhtinian "heteroglot voices" (Bakhtin 278) saturate the oral and written discourse that students produce as they engage in discussions and as they write in a wide variety of genres,…

In the May 2009 issue of "English Journal", we reported on our analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to provide a first look at changes in the teaching of writing over the past 30 years. In this article, we provide a more detailed look, drawing on data collected from visits to 260 English, math, social…