In fall 2013, Career and Technical Education (CTE)-focused composition classes were piloted to accommodate Leeward Community College's requirement for college-level composition for students in the CTE majors. The first CTE-focused class was an accelerated developmental education reading and writing course for students placing two steps below…

A recent community wide reading program offers a valuable opportunity for students and teachers to respond to literature by attending community wide events, creating art, and developing relationships with community members.

Casey Cuny was frustrated with the lack of depth in his high school English students' writing. He'd heard about Socratic seminars but was reluctant to try them until he saw them in action. He decided to conduct Socratic seminars with his students centered on the question, What is the value of life? In past years, student papers on this…

Creative writing courses are growing in universities and outside them. Publishers and agents even turn to them now as sources of promise and talent. This article describes a particularly successful MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths College in London and makes a case for the popularity and the usefulness to universities, to aspiring writers and…

Larissa Pahomov teaches students English and Journalism at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The school opened its doors to students just seven years ago and was designed to encourage both inquiry and critical pedagogy. To those ends, there is a thematic curriculum for each grade level--for sophomores, it's…

The Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning (C-SAIL), funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, examines how college- and career-readiness (CCR) standards are implemented, if they improve student learning, and what instructional tools measure and support their implementation. This brief presents findings from C-SAIL's…

In this article the author opens up a space for reflective inquiry linked to her pedagogy with Student English Teachers and in conjunction with readings on embodiment and aesthetic experience. The author tries to deepen her practice as a teacher educator, 'looking back to travel forward' (Cremin et al. 2005:1) and looking forward in desire and…

This article describes the author's search for an appropriate and satisfying online teaching method. After experimenting with several methods (chat room, discussion board, student led discussion), the author reached back to his face-to-face classroom success with literature circles. This article reports the results of research conducted by the…

Just as theory is important in music education, it is important in reading education. Theory backs the practice. In reading research, fluency is an important skill required of readers (Rasinski, 2012; National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, 2000; Texas Education Agency, 2014). Fluency--defined as the ability to read accurately,…

Recently a dichotomy has developed in the field of TESOL between native English speaker teachers (NESTs) and non-native English speaker teachers (NNESTs) with some in each camp promoting one over the other, but this only separates rather than unifies our profession. In this article I suggest that it is not in anybody's interests to continue with…

This article provides a description of three seventh grade English teachers' attempt to augment creativity, reading, and deep understanding, and the standards they used to come up with five essential questions surrounding an eight-week unit on poetry. Each of these questions helps to address the school standards and the Common Core State Standards…

This article discusses the published work and career of James Moffett (1929-96), focusing in particular on Kanawha County, West Virginia, in the 1970s, when his innovative textbook series,--"Interaction," after adoption by the county, was opposed by local and national conservative activists. The series was ultimately dropped by the…

In this article, Dianne Excell shares her experience of a cross-phase, collaborative project funded by the British Council that brought together teachers and pupils from three schools in Bradford and five schools in Peshawar, Pakistan. Although history was just one element of the project (which also included English, art, food technology and IT),…

In many cases, teachers shy away from including much writing because of the many hours it requires to read and provide substantial feedback on such papers. Yet writing is widely understood as critically important to learning (Applebee & Langer, 2013; Mayher, 1983; Zinsser, 1989). This article describes a program from the Northwest Arkansas…

Whether novice or experienced, writers must come to terms with the daunting task of filling up a blank page, or screen, in an effort to produce writing. Student writers are no different. They enter teachers' classes having confronted similar difficulties with discovering what it is they want to say. In seeking to help students, they devote…