Lily Rosene began her teaching career in 2020 when COVID-19 derailed her career plans and anearby school was desperate for teachers. She entered her first 9th-grade English classroom without a clear understanding of her students or the curriculum. However, she knew reading was important to any English classroom, so she decided to make silent…

In October 2023, the California Department of Education released test scores for all students in Grades 3-8 and 11 for the 2022-23 school year. These results represent an opportunity to analyze whether and to what extent student learning has rebounded after the dramatic declines in scores resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and related school…

What happens when, in a nation under lockdown, teaching moves online? How is English as a school subject being differently configured? What are the gains and losses? This essay examines, through the prism of a single online lesson, the approach to English, to curriculum and pedagogy, that has been adopted by the Oak National Academy website, a…

How can comedy be used as an effective tool and truly help innovate the learning experience? This paper outlines how aspects of comedy have been creatively integrated into primary and secondary academic curricula such as English Language Arts, social studies, drama, as well as in areas of mental health and wellness. The essay demonstrates, for…

The COVID-19 pandemic has had far-reaching impacts in the lives of American students and educators. Educators faced an upheaval and adjustment to a "new normal" as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, involving extensive use of technology and remote learning. During the pandemic, I was employed as both a sixth grade English language arts…

How does a beginning teacher go about constructing a teacherly identity in a pandemic? How does one reconcile what might be with what is, as dictated by the rhetoric of a neoliberal government, which prizes the individual mind over the collective one, the product over the process, and results over relationships? This essay explores these questions…

This article describes the Infusing Computing project, a 4-year study designed to support middle and high school teachers in infusing computational thinking (CT) into their disciplinary teaching. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, weeklong workshops held in summer 2020 were shifted to a virtual format and utilized emerging technology tools, synchronous…

The purpose of this action research was to improve reading comprehension and student engagement in a hybrid learning environment as measured by performance on reading comprehension assessments and student self-reporting surveys. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I conducted classes for the 2020-2021 school year in a hybrid model. In my ninth grade…