School district consolidation is one of the most widespread education reforms of the last century, but surprisingly little research has directly investigated its effectiveness. To examine the impact of consolidation on student achievement, this study takes advantage of a policy that requires the consolidation of all Arkansas school districts with…

Historically, language instruction involving Black Language (BL) assumes a goal of eradication, particularly in school-sanctioned literacy practices. Language arts education for Black students must be liberatory, that is, antiracist and artful. The opportunities for English Language Arts (ELA) teachers to create, augment, and change the course of…

This article focuses on the development of the Texas comprehension standards as found in the comprehension strand of the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS). The standards are described in relation to effective comprehension strategies.

Formal teacher leader programs that develop, position, and reward teachers to work with peers to improve instruction are a growing reform effort in the United States, yet there are few published studies of their efficacy. In this paper, we examine the impacts of one district's teacher leadership program on students' annual state test performance.…

Our study documents how a Spanish-English bilingual elementary teacher learned computational thinking while working to incorporate it into mathematics and language arts lessons in a bilingual classroom. We classified the elements of the teacher's process into two practices: intentional and unintentional use of computational thinking. Intentional…

A critical aspect of the development of culturally relevant classroom assessments is the design of tasks that affirm students' racial and ethnic identities and community cultural practices. This paper describes the process we followed to build a shared understanding of what culturally relevant assessments are, to pursue ways of bringing more…

In this essay, Jacob Pleasants, Dani el G. Krutka, and T. Philip Nichols outline a vision for how technology education can and ought to occur through the core subject areas of science, social studies, and English language arts. In their argument for the development of a technoskeptical stance for thinking critically and making informed decisions…

Preservice teacher education must support teacher candidates (TCs) in developing both an emerging vision and a beginning repertoire of practice. Social justice teacher education and practice-based teacher education are well positioned to collaborate in supporting TCs in developing justice-oriented visions (JOVs) and learning to enact them in…

Student-centered classrooms, where the focus is on the way students learn concepts and skills rather than the way a teacher delivers the lessons, is a popular theme in current classrooms at all levels. A clear distinction must be made between student-centered teaching as a philosophy and student-centered teaching as a specific set of instructional…

The phenomenon of interest in this study was veteran K-5 English language arts (ELA) teachers' perceptions of blended learning as an educational innovation setting and how they perceived the implementation of blended learning into their instructional routine. Blended learning is normally used in higher-level education but is now also used in the…

This qualitative study highlights the practices of current secondary English language arts teachers who graduated from the teacher education program at George Mason University to address the following research questions: (1) To what extent and in what ways do English language arts teachers who graduated from one teacher education program that…

The purpose of this action research study was to evaluate the effect of a robotics-based intervention on empathy for students enrolled in secondary English and literature courses. Empathy, as a concept, is an integral component of reading comprehension and student motivation. A decline in reported individual levels of empathy among young adults…

The author takes the experience of book challenges as an opportunity for positive curricular changes by walking readers through the development of a formalized procedure for selecting new, diverse texts to add to the English Language Arts (ELA) program curriculum. The text-selection committee arrived at a six-step method: (1) Identify Desired…

This paper presents research that examined teacher talk about moderation of English, mathematics and science assessment across Years 4, 6 and 8 as part of a broader inquiry into the use of scaled exemplars to support consistency of teacher judgement. The paper draws on Dorothy E Smith's sociological work, including the process of mapping textual…

Knowledge development, application, and refinement are essential parts of students' reading. One way to observe how students use their knowledge as they read is through talk. Studies routinely indicate that though reading is a social endeavor, teachers spend most of the allotted instructional time talking or using discourse patterns that do not…