In this article, three students share how performing in Shakespearean plays have helped them appreciate his work. Orubba Almansouri describes how acting out the play "Romeo and Juliet" allowed him to understand the whole story better. While rehearsing and performing "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Aram S. Balian became a true Shakespeare fan,…

The author's career in professional education is intertwined with the history of language arts education in the United States and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The author joined NCTE in the 1960s, though she was already teaching for about 10 years with a well-developed constructivist perspective on teaching and learning.…

The beauty of American public education is that the potential of every individual is acknowledged with the clear expectation that each person should receive a high-quality, academically focused education. The challenge, then, is how to achieve that goal when students come with a variety of backgrounds, talents, interests, limitations, and…

In this article, the author describes how he co-teaches an interdisciplinary American Studies class that fosters inquiry and reflection on the complexity of an authentic telling of US history. With the help of his partner, a social studies teacher, the author designed an American Studies course that aims to reveal to students that America's…

This article comes from a speech that Richard Peck gave at the Colorado Language Arts Society Regional Spring Conference in 2007. At our request, he prepared this excerpt for "English Journal" readers.

Sierra Leone is only one of the more than 50 armed conflicts currently going on around the world. It is estimated that 20 million children were either refugees or displaced internally, and some 300,000 children under the age of 18 were used in hostilities at any given time as government or rebel soldiers, with about one-third reportedly fighting…

This article presents the story and reflection of Jennifer Ritter who shares two critical elements in the process of induction into the world of teaching English. She reminds teachers that the matching of student teacher and cooperating teacher is seldom the result of the extended scrutiny of the attributes of the prospective teacher and the…

Summer is a time for teachers to recharge their pedagogical batteries. Here, three veteran English teachers write about professional development programs that energized them and their teaching.

In this chapter from his forthcoming book, Tom Romano reflects on the zigzag path that he has followed in making a life for himself in teaching.

To teach reading to a transient population of incarcerated young men on Rikers Island, Dave Iasevoli utilized the students' desire for knowledge and their talent for storytelling, humor, and acting to engage them. Students embodied the characters by reading aloud from the novel "The Planet of Junior Brown," from which discussions about obesity,…

Traces how the author inspired a popular poem. (JL)

An English teacher describes how she made international travel a part of her continuing development as a teacher. She has made her lifelong dream an important influence in her classroom by applying for funding and organizing group travel with students.

During his own student experience, it was an especially gifted teacher that moved the author, and gave him a sense of direction, a direction which he refers to as self-discovery that would characterize his own pursuit of an education. What motivated him to postphone retirement, is the freedom to teach in ways that he feels are effective and that…

In this article, the author recounts her teaching experience with new high school students at Northwest Yeshiva High School, an Orthodox Jewish high school on Mercer Island. In teaching the students about writing, the author describes how she was moved by the narratives written by her students, and that after reading their stories she decided to…

Uses personal reminiscences to show how the past does not die but becomes part of an understandable pattern in life. Suggests that keeping a journal increases that understanding. (MM)