This interview was recorded in November 2012 in Jonathan Z. Smith's Hyde Park graystone. Professor Smith offers insights into how he thinks about his classroom teaching and his students' learning through descriptions of various assignments and classroom activities he has developed over more than forty years of teaching. The discussion…

If a liberal arts education should prepare our students to participate in a meaningful way in democracy, what does that mean for how we design our courses across disciplines? In this paper, I first address the question: who should teach democratic skills? Using an upper-level course in Canadian politics, I then illustrate how to explicitly…

Describes one teacher's difficulty in getting his eighth-grade students to revise their writing. Discusses his successful use of writing "skeletons" to help define what revision is and to teach a structure for one type of revision. (SR)

Discusses Bloom's Taxonomy of Cognitive Skills and presents a table that outlines and defines its six skill levels. Introduces articles in this journal describing assignments for business communications which involve the these higher-order thinking skills. (SR)

Presents and explains a framework that can be used to determine the potential authenticity of teaching practices. Describes the potential for authenticity offered by thematic literacy instruction. (SR)

Pupils need to express themselves in creative processes and products in the language arts curriculum. Too frequently, teachers require behavior which involves conformity on the part of learners. Specific objectives many times delimit pupils' opportunities to express original ideas that come from within the involved learners. Many activities can…

Describes what business plans are and how educators can use them in class for a team writing assignment. (RS)

For both reading and writing, context and perspective are everything; Ann Berthoff suggests that students "write continuously in a double-entry notebook." One instructor has utilized Berthoff's double-entry notebook in a technical writing class and finds that this classroom practice has also been informed by other theories inquiring into…

Suggests that an effective way to develop students' writing abilities is to teach writing through journalism. Discusses the successes the author has had in incorporating journalistic writing strategies into elementary and secondary English/language arts classrooms. (RS)

Proposes a turn toward "social-process rhetorical inquiry" in composition, a turn that requires further pedagogical adaptations of cultural studies methodologies in writing classrooms. Notes that the social-process heuristic is based on a cyclical model of writing processes, a model comprising cultural production, contextual…

Writing is a fundamental skill for students to develop. A learning environment should be in evidence which assists students to achieve more optimally in writing. Writing activities should be interesting, purposeful, meaningful, and provide for individual differences. Students need stimulating learning opportunities involving a variety of purposes…

Examines the debate between two approaches to teaching writing: imitation of classic models versus technical writing for the real world. Argues that, in either approach, a developmental sequence of assignments is paramount. Describes compromise course plan based on careers, in which students write research papers about vocations in which they are…

In "Rhetoric, Discovery and Change" (1970), R. Young, A. Becker, and K. Pike took Carl Rogers' empathetic approach out of the context of one-on-one therapy and put it into the writing classroom. They proposed the now standard formulaic structure of argumentation which emphasizes a strong thesis up front, a detailed account of the…

Pupils should participate in numerous forms and kinds of writing activities involving poetry and should hear, read, and write different forms and kinds of prose. Types of poetry that pupils can write include couplets, triplets, quatrains, limericks, free verse, haiku, and diamante. The ingredients that all types of poetry might have include…

Considers how English teachers, by building a complementary relationship with the workplace, can prepare students better for success in the coming century. Focuses on ways of revolutionizing writing instruction with real world problems. Discusses three examples of real workplace projects demonstrating the notion of writing as problem solving. (HB)