Responsible instruction teaches students to navigate digital news and social media spaces that barrage and overwhelm many of them. In truth, it overwhelms many adults. This article examines how English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms are uniquely positioned to curtail this trend by teaching students the value of informed citizenship and compelling…

The author shows how using art helped a blind student in an AP class and students in Creative and Practical Writing classes improve writing proficiency and critical thinking.

Having students read news articles or novels, watch television snippets, engage in class discussions, essay-writing, emailing, and drafting letters are excellent ways to broach any number of society's systemic and oppressive social maladies. Engaging in these activities in the English language arts classroom can serve as a catalyst to encourage…

Thomas Nunnally equates five-paragraph format essays with square cucumbers found at farmer's markets: they have an established structure but no argument. The real square cucumbers are students who need a formula to write competently. By providing students with a real audience, a teacher can show that he or she takes students' desires -- and…

The author began using 1:1 screencast video assessment tools: nimble apps such as Movenote, Screencastify, and Snagit that attach to his browser and allow him to efficiently provide a far more valuable writing assessment experience for students than ever before. This article explains the many advantages of Digital Video (DV) Assessments, student…

When schools in Arkansas and most of the country shut their physical doors and moved to remote instruction in March 2020, Rachel Evans, Christian Goering, and Seth French planned to engage in a multifaceted experience that bridged personal narrative writing, songwriting, and podcasting. Undaunted by the shutdown, they offered Evans' ninth-grade…

The author pushes two desks together in the front of the class and pile supplies on them: markers, drawing paper, rulers, and pencils. As the students enter a combined English language arts (ELA) and English as a New Language (ENL) tenth-grade classroom, they select what they need and settle in to their work. As an ELA educator who is also a…

Along with forty-nine other high school students, as the author recounts of their student, Meghan is part of an elective two-week academic writing workshop. Each day begins with a freewrite exercise like this one, designed to help students develop what the workshop directors call "fluency." Like Meghan, many students write prolifically…

The author was invited as a teaching artist into a first-grade classroom in New York City to teach a 14-session poetry residency culminating in an anthology of student writing. They began by sitting together on a carpet by the interactive whiteboard and read aloud several examples of "I wish" poems from Kenneth Koch's (1970) wonderful…

While teaching in Taiwan, Ah-Young Song found that asking students for midterm self-reflections helped them to be more attuned to their distinct educational trajectories and that their comments provided useful insights into adjustments that could be made as a teacher. This article describes how two of those English language learners from the…

This article focuses on how adolescent writers took up an invitation to write and share a piece of work in school that wasn't tied to a grade. Students' responses to this invitation are examined in an effort to revise some of the typical approaches to teaching writing.

A writing invitation the author has found useful is to ask students to identify indelible educational moments. They all have them, some positive, some damaging. The moments don't need to have taken place in school. They could involve outdoor as well as indoor schooling: a moment when they realized betrayal for example; a moment when they knew they…

This article explores the possibilities (and complexities) of multimodal meaning-making in the digital dimension, which allows students to compose with a variety of different modes, such as images, sound, music, and writing. This lets them think deeply about the ways in which meaning is constructed, conveyed, and eventually interpreted by an…

The author argues that English teachers are in a unique position to respond to death through writing, reading, and speaking. She describes four experiences and offers specific, language-based responses guided by experience and literature.

In this article, the authors (Aaron Guggenheim, a White cisgender researcher and English Language Arts (ELA) teacher, and David Glover, a mixed-race, cisgender former ELA teacher) explore how a digital writing project on podcasting enacted with eleventh and twelfth graders provided opportunities to uncover the students' hidden identities as…