The authors examine the functions of literacy in three accountability-driven English language arts classrooms. To explore the interplay between transmission-oriented, standards-based instruction and local interpretations and uses of literacy, they employed Pennycook's (2010) notion of relocalization. The authors examine how accountability…

Seventh- and 8th-grade students in a within-teacher randomized control study read from visual-syntactic formatted text for 44 min per week over the course of 1 year. On the annual state assessment, we found small statistically significant improvements on the overall English Language Arts scaled score (ES = 0.05, p < 0.05) and the writing…

While the contents of K-6 basal readers have been recently examined (Dewitz, Leahy, Jones, Sullivan, 2010; Moss, 2008; Moss & Newton, 2002), the contents of secondary school literature anthologies have been vastly ignored in the last 2 decades. Given the Common Core State Standards' division of literary and informational text across content…

Scaffolding is widely referenced in educational literature and practice, in literacy education in particular, but often in reductive ways. Scaffolding is key for diverse youth in high-need settings, but few studies examine complexities and tensions of scaffolding in practice. This study asked how, if at all, teachers at a California high school…

This article explores how one specially prepared, accomplished teacher managed dilemmas that arose as she worked to enact responsive language arts instruction with English Learners in a policy context that privileged high-stakes accountability and standardization. Drawing on sociocultural learning theory, the article illustrates how the teacher's…

The "Handbook on Innovations in Learning" focuses on innovations--both methodological and technological--in teaching and learning that promise to surpass standard practice in achieving learning outcomes for students. The experts who have written chapters in this Handbook first identify the underlying principles of learning and then…

Last year, the author and his ninth-grade students explored ways to use mobile media devices such as iPods and cell phones to help guide literacy practices in their English classroom. Their school, South Central High School (SCHS; a pseudonym), is a public high school located in urban Los Angeles. As part of their seven-week exploration, the…

Every educator's quest is to help students learn in the environment that will allow them to obtain and retain the information presented to them. In the new age of technology, more students are able to choose the environment in which they learn. This study is a quantitative comparative study of the academic performance between online and…

This paper analyzes the influence of three different learning paradigms for learning literacy--formalist, cognitive-processing, and literacy practices--on the implementation of the Common Core State Standards. It argues that the Common Core State Standards are based largely on a formalist paradigm as evident in the emphasis on teaching text…

Student goal setting and academic planning has been a major focus for PUSD, with the aim of increasing the level of student engagement and student ownership over their learning. Goal setting has been implemented in conjunction with the Northwest Evaluation Association's Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) tests, which provide educators with a tool…

This document presents writing samples that have been annotated to illustrate the criteria required to meet the Common Core State Standards for particular types of writing--argument, informative/explanatory text, and narrative--in a given grade. Each of the samples exhibits at least the level of quality required to meet the Writing standards for…

Linguistics is a subject that has remained largely confined to the academy, rather than being integrated into school curricula. This is unfortunate but not surprising, as although some teacher education programs include courses on linguistics, it is not comprehensively integrated into teacher education, so it is largely absent from the curriculum.…

Despite high levels of disengagement in urban literacy classrooms, few teachers have seen fit to explore spoken word--the performance of poetry--as a tool to engage students in literacy. Spoken word poetry serves as a powerful means of self-representation for youth that are traditionally portrayed as threatening, menaces to society that do not…

Much has been written about the value of teacher research for inservice teachers. Despite the existence of several studies affirming these words, studies that richly describe how student teachers learn to do teacher research and then investigate the impact of inquiry on student teachers and teacher educators, particularly in culturally and…

California Early Literacy Learning (CELL) and Extended Literacy Learning (ExLL) are professional development programs designed to help elementary teachers strengthen their teaching of reading and writing. Research-based teaching methodologies are organized into a framework for classroom instruction. CELL training (pre-K-Grade 3) emphasizes that…