As Catholic schools serve an increasingly racially diverse population of students, they must grapple with the critical requirement to address these students' unique needs while heeding the call from modern Catholic Church leaders to engage in explicit antiracist action. Using the Historically Responsive Literacy Framework (HRL), this article…

Purpose: The pandemic has presented many new challenges tasking teachers with meeting the various social-emotional, academic and logistical needs of students in the midst of an ever-changing landscape. The onset of COVID-19 has drastically impacted schools and inevitably raised questions about nearly all aspects of teaching including but not…

Technical literacy instruction and authentic learning opportunities need to be implemented through cross-curricular collaboration into secondary ELA curriculums to bridge the disconnect between K-12 education and the demands of the 21st-century workforce. The Common Core State Standards as well as newly adopted legislation in Maryland, Blueprint…

Culturally responsive instruction scholarship often presents a binary standard that teachers either satisfy or do not, a determination largely based on perceptions of observed practice. Yet, conclusions about teachers' cultural responsiveness are dubious when researchers do not account for teachers' intent. Conceptualizing cultural responsiveness…

Much research has noted the misalignment between kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) academic standards and curriculum materials used in classrooms. Many states and education organizations have been pushing for greater use of standards-aligned curriculum, especially during the past several years. In this report, the authors share results…

In secondary schools in the United States, youth who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, or queer (LGBTQ) encounter unwelcoming and unsafe, if not outright hostile, climates, experiences which lead to negative outcomes, both personal and academic. However, school-based supports such as supportive adults, GSA clubs, and LGBT-inclusive…

This practitioner inquiry study investigates learning from the stories of emergent bilingual students as they complete project based learning units. This method of instruction created the space to have one-on-one conversations, listen in culturally responsive ways, and develop asset-based literacy curriculum. I argue that relationships formed…

Research in English education needs further exploration on the purposeful implementation of death and grief within English curriculum. In this article Lori D. Ungemah examines how, as a high school English teacher, she integrated death and grief into a unit of study with her eleventh- grade English class. She discusses how her curriculum…

Students with significant disabilities have intellectual disability and require individualized modifications, adaptations, and supports to access grade-level content (National Center on Educational Outcomes, 2013). This group of students presents a unique challenge for literacy instruction, particularly at the high school level. Teachers must…

Transition curricula are courses, learning modules, or online tutorials typically developed jointly by secondary and postsecondary faculty and offered no later than 12th grade to students at risk of being placed into remedial math or English programs in college. Based on interviews and other data, this brief describes key elements of English…

English Learners (ELs) make up 9.6% of the total student population in the U.S. (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019). Students with interrupted formal education (SIFE) are a subgroup of ELs who have had at least two fewer years of schooling than their peers, and function at least two years below grade level in reading and mathematics…

Across the country, adolescents are writing and performing spoken word poetry. In this article, the author works with members of a spoken word poetry group to develop ways to integrate spoken word into classroom and school communities.

This 15-year program of research explored the extent to which prosocial attitudes and behavior of high school students were increased by focused lesson plans administered in dedicated high school classrooms over 1 or 2 academic semesters. The narrative describes the evolution of the Character Development and Leadership Program from a pilot study…

This article offers strategies for adjusting in-class curriculum to align with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), and how to increase fluency with the demands of standardized tests. The implementation of the standards themselves, the inequality among school districts, whether the tests measure privilege over aptitude, the quality of…

In this article Deidre Faughey shares an experimental classroom project that she developed with a diverse group of students in three ninth-grade English Language Arts (ELA) classes. Podcasts provide a unique opportunity for students to embrace experimentation and to take risks with their own voices, explore the school building and community, and…