The PhotoVoice tool invites participants to create photographs that reflect aspects of their surroundings that they find problematic and to elaborate on them in writing. Participants then share their photographs and written accounts with an influential audience with the hope of resolving the highlighted concerns. Aiming to connect the classroom to…

Many students are experiencing precarity in the current political climate. School walls are permeable, and even the best efforts of teachers to create safe environments where young people can learn about and express themselves cannot fully insulate the classroom from the vulnerabilities produced outside of it. These vulnerabilities may inspire, in…

Mathematics teachers often resist generic literacy strategies because they do not seem relevant to math learning. Discipline-specific literacy practices that emerge directly from the math content and processes under study are more likely to be embraced by math teachers. Furthermore, national and state-level mathematics standards as well as Common…

In Part I, we underscore the issues surrounding young deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) learners of literacy in Taiwan who use sign to support their learning of Chinese literacy. We also described the linguistic features of Chinese writing and the visual codes used by DHH children. In Part II, we describe the reading and writing practices used with…

Although this author had experience teaching postsecondary academic writing, she had never done one-on-one tutoring. Therefore, One-on-One Literacy trained her as a novice volunteer tutor to work with adults who wished to expand their reading and writing skills. The tutor training included developing an individualized program suited to the…

The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) incorporates challenging literacy standards into middle grades and high school content areas within a variety of academic disciplines, not just English/language arts courses. The Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) provides schools with instructional tools needed to help teachers understand and implement…

Learning to write is an arduous undertaking for every student; for deaf and hard of hearing students, it can be particularly difficult. Too often, they arrive in school with minimal literacy skills, experience subsequent difficulties in writing standard English, and, unfortunately, still graduate with reading levels below those of their hearing…

This article describes lessons learned about grouping by teachers and teacher educators who worked collaboratively to design and deliver a summer writing institute for a heterogeneous population of students about to begin ninth grade at an urban high school. Institute staff used co-teaching (Cook & Friend, 1995) extensively to provide support for…

The purpose of this "teaching tips" article is to describe practical classroom instruction that helps elementary students write expository responses to narrative texts. It focuses on the importance of scaffolded, interactive discussions comprised of a combination of teacher think alouds and similar student responses before, during, and…

Statistics show that American students' reading and writing skills are lagging at a time when literacy skills are needed more than ever. Efforts to address low adolescent literacy levels meet numerous challenges, chief among them is the fact that formal literacy instruction ends for most students after the elementary grades. Career and technical…

How do second-language learners become successful readers and writers? This article examines the importance of social networks to English language learners' reading and writing development. It describes different family, peer, and virtual social networks that ELLs can utilize to engage in online and offline reading and writing (especially related…

This paper presents a concise model of literacy assessment based on the "simple view of reading" and the "simple view of writing". The approach targets directly the key skills and knowledge involved in reading, writing and spelling. It stands in contrast to the less precise and potentially more subjective "always-in-context" and "always-authentic"…

This article follows the development of three literacy programs that were designed by researchers at Michigan State University to support struggling readers and writers. The literacy interventions focus on strategy instruction in both writing and reading, and they culminate in the development of an integrated reading-writing program to support the…

Students in intermediate and middle level grades are often caught up in the exciting visual images and auditory stimuli that are a part of all their everyday communication and learning experiences. As a group of students who are growing intellectually and socially in the midst of, and through, predominantly media messages, they require reading and…

This article discusses creative writing which promotes literacy and content learning in a social studies classroom. In this article, the author states, that educators must encourage students' creative energies and enable them to engage with content in new and stimulating ways. One way to help students really learn about the concepts inherent in…