The "College, Career, and Civil Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards" guides teachers to initiate complex inquiries by sparking students' disciplinary literacy and critical analysis of rich sources. With effective scaffolding and engaging content, elementary students can explore and contextualize complex historical…

In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators' efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents' stories of life in…

The Change Writers project was born in the Title I schools of Elk Grove, California, when Gail Desler, a technology integration specialist, became motivated to open up the district's mandated "Open Court" curriculum to better serve intermediate-grade students. Through writing, technology, and imagination, a larger conversation was…

Online conversations help teachers engage in constructive criticism and attend more carefully to aligning lesson plans with problem solving. This article describes a strategy for using an online discussion board to help teachers evaluate one another's lesson plans. The online peer-review activity suggests that fostering critical pedagogical…

The provision for allowing local education agencies to use an assessment of a student's response to intervention (RTI) in lieu of a consideration of an ability--achievement discrepancy has been a controversial aspect of the 2004 Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. To address issues that have arisen about RTI, a series of…

Advanced 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students at the Gifted Resource Center (GRC) in a suburban Chicago public school district are regularly engaged in various types of activities. The GRC uses language arts units for high ability students created and developed as a base curriculum at the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary.…

This article describes Project Athena, a Javits program funded by the U.S. Department of Education and developed through the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary. Project Athena seeks to find ways to help impoverished children develop advanced skills in reading comprehension, literary analysis, and persuasive writing. Its…