This Teaching Tips describes a yearlong process of facilitating meaningful discussion groups about literature with first-grade students in an urban Title I school. At the beginning of the year, the teacher provided explicit instruction in speaking and listening skills to support students with the social skills needed for thoughtful discussion. She…

An inner-city second grade teacher-researcher and her university-based partner examine how she and her inner-city second graders learned to resist and expand the constraints of their mandated, scripted reading curriculum by exploring their neighborhood and classrooms as communities spaces for literacies learning. Drawing on an interactional…

Describes four innercity families and the ways in which they use print in their daily lives. Finds wide variation in the degrees to which print permeates the lives of innercity children, in both the extent to which family members use print and the types of print being written and read. (SR)

Presents the results of a Title I program serving severely deprived children who have been identified as having reading difficulties. (RB)

Presents guidelines for implementing a district-wide reading improvement system, gleaned from the experiences of the Detroit school system. (ET)

Describes a study of classroom interaction by Jules Henry, a noted anthropologist. (DD)

Affective factors are at least as important as dialect differences in discovering why innercity children have difficulty learning, according to the research cited in this literature review. (RB)

Describes experiences with first-grade children on two "literacy walks" through the streets around their school. Argues that the print that surrounds children in urban communities can provide an excellent source of literacy conversation and learning, and that by taking literacy walks with children in their community, teachers can learn…

Notes how the authors visited a sixth-grade classroom in an urban setting to teach students about jazz using children's literature. Describes how they played the music, talked about its basic structure and unique characteristics, read books aloud about the major musicians, and encouraged the students to experience the music for themselves. (SG)

Describes how a first-grade bilingual program in Tucson, Arizona became class pen pals throughout the year with inner-city second graders from Toledo, Ohio. Notes that this would prove beneficial for lessons in reading and writing and would promote their knowledge about their city and state. Discusses how it expanded into cross-curricular lessons…

Outlines in question-and-answer form the main issues of the Newark, New Jersey teacher strike, early 1971. (MB)

Reports the findings of a matched-group study showing that the academic achievement of native Canadian elementary school children was not significantly different from that of their nonnative peers. (FL)

Describes two projects that incorporated inquiry into urban educational settings. Offers practical considerations for employing technology-enhanced inquiry in the classroom and discusses broader theoretical issues related to the contribution of technology to literacy learning and motivation when students ask their own significant learning…

Concludes that an ongoing, onsite, supervised inservice program providing regular diagnostic feedback to teachers doubled the reading comprehension gain scores of low SES Black intermediate-grade students from a large urban school district as compared to the gains of students whose teachers did not participate in program. (FL)