A teacher educator explores the way students' metaphors for literacy reveal depth and complicated emotions. Metaphor has played a major role in Jen McConnel's scholarship and teaching, both as a reflexive activity and, as her research methodology. In her most recent work, she developed a metaphor elicitation process that is, primarily, a creative…

To invite students to write about death is to explore an opulent and rich world of sorrow and emotion. It is a world that demands understanding and that engages students in a truly visceral way. And, it is an assignment that incorporates personal discovery with social and political issues, stretching writers in ways that many assignments do not.…

Trust is a central component of caring, reciprocal relationships among teachers and students. It goes beyond teachers caring solely about students' academic achievement and includes caring about what matters deeply to students, their families, and their communities. To examine the importance of teachers creating trusting relations with their…

Faced with standardized writing tests, students must write on demand to prompts they haven't chosen. While students have little control over the prompts they must answer or the time and space limitations in which they must answer them, students and teachers have opportunities for meaningful resistance to standardized writing tests in reconsidering…

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…

The personal essay remains pervasive in high school classrooms, but many curriculum leaders have shifted to stressing the importance of evidence-based, argumentative writing. Some teachers have rightfully lamented this shift, noting that the evidence-based turn in writing instruction comes at the expense of student voice and expression. Students…

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…

When a student in a community-based writing program asked to write science fiction (SF), rather than a personal essay, he prompted the staff to expand the scope of the program's curriculum. This article describes how SF became another avenue for discussing community change. However, instead of just evaluating their worlds and writing about what…

Revisiting the writing assignments that the author has given to his sophomores and juniors over the past four years, he can identify patterns that have complicated their writing development. This article explores how Aristotle's enthymeme can serve as an effective prewriting tool for literary analysis in the high school classroom. By foregrounding…

According to the author, English classrooms across the country have the potential to be the incubators we need to repair public discourse. Through traditional and innovative strategies, the author states, we can begin to rebuild our national conversation from the ground up, letting students take the lead while guiding them along their journey…

In this article, the authors share what they learned from their study of writing communities, which they refer to as writing groups, during the 2017-18 school year. The authors propose a conceptual framework for writing groups that engages students in the process of designing and participating as writers with their peers. The framework emphasizes…

"Transcendentalism" refers to philosophical, religious, and literary beliefs held by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, and other writers in New England during the 1830s and 1840s. Emerson believed in the significance of one's intuition and individuality. He expresses these beliefs in his…

In this article, the authors describe how integrating music with reading and writing practices stimulated transmediation to (1) honor musical students' identities, (2) deepen readers' meaning making with literature, and (3) invite writers' memories to generate emotional grist for composing poetry. The authors share examples to inspire teachers to…

For the past ten years, the author has been teaching a dual credit college first-year writing course to seniors in high school. In this article, the author presents a framework for writing instruction and evaluation that centers on students responding to current topics and issues through digital writing for an authentic audience.

This article describes how four English language arts teachers formed an inquiry group to design approaches to writing assessment that would support and foster student writers' agency, empowerment, and freedom. They hoped that by focusing assessment on students' articulation of their writing processes rather than on rubrics or final products, they…