This article serves as an invitation to see the way the teaching of biography-driven writing has been increasingly pushed out of the secondary English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum in favor of highly structured, formulaic, and impersonal writing, and how this is a setback for students in their preparation for college and career writing. The…

Many students experience that the prepackaged secondary English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum used in many classrooms does not effectively engage them or further their English acquisition. This article shares the story of creating a curriculum the authors believe other teachers can emulate to successfully teach adolescents who are new to…

This article uses Daniel José Older's Shadowshaper as the core of a unit challenging students and teachers to confront and dismantle systems of oppression.

Playful teaching is a little-explored way to reinvigorate secondary classrooms with our vibrant mutual humanity. The author has come to believe not only that the ludic can be harnessed for academic engagement and growth but also that play can infuse the US secondary classroom with the humanity, equality, and democracy it lacks. It all begins with…

During the 2016-2017 academic year, a collaborative of university faculty and high school teachers piloted an innovative approach to professional development, focusing on secondary level literacy in a diverse suburban district. The approach included innovations in both process and content compared to professional development (PD) and instructional…

National Writing Project (NWP) sites work within an established framework of summer institutes, teacher-led professional development, and continuity to cultivate teacher leaders and empower them by applying these principles. Invitational Summer Institutes traditionally serve as the gateway by which teachers become involved with NWP sites and start…

According to the author, a teacher might both feed the soul and heed the voice of others. National Writing Project's (NWP) Summer Invitational Institute (SI) provides this opportunity. Since its first SI in 2007, Ozarks Writing Project (OWP), an NWP site at Missouri State University in Springfield, Missouri, has been helping southwest Missouri…

This article explores Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) as a powerful practice that re-imagines the who, what, why, and how of research in the English classroom. Three educators share classroom journeys in helping students ask and answer questions about their worlds in ways that inspire personal, academic, and civic change.

Inspired by Leslie David Burns and Stergios G. Botzakis's efforts to demonstrate how texts recognized as exemplars by the Common Core State Standards could be used to address national standards and meet the needs of contemporary students, the author aims to illustrate how alternative nonfiction, nonprint texts--sports-based documentary…

As close reading assessment becomes ubiquitous in secondary education, so too does our interest in new literacies. Though online reading may seem to be at cross purposes with "on paper" close reading, this author suggests how the two may successfully intersect. The close reading initiative at Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School in…

In this article, the authors examine (second) author Elma's teaching and learning, as it has been and continues to be shaped by her experiences in education. The authors interrogate her experiences in teacher education and in the K-12 system, considering the closed doors that she has encountered. The authors discuss how these experiences have…

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…

This article interrogates some metaphors that Common Core State Standards (CCSS) proponents have used as arguments to characterize CCSS, and then checks the facts that others have amassed around the issue. The authors offer up considerations of metaphor as a rhetorical resistance strategy: Name, Frame, Fact (Check), and then Speak Up. Teachers…

In this article, the authors report the importance of teaching students about collaborative writing. When teachers are effective in helping students to learn processes for collaborative writing, everyone involved needs to speak, listen, write, and read about how to write well and what makes writing good. Students are forced to "go meta"…

Beginning teachers typically enter schools feeling like foreigners, coping often with the jolting disorientation of not knowing where to find basic things such as restrooms, copiers, and mailboxes. They also struggle to pick up on the routines that others seem to have mastered with ease. At the same time, the culture and territory of US schools…