The purpose of this report is to summarize the activities of the standard-setting meeting for the New York State Alternate Assessment (NYSAA) in English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics (Grades 3-8 and High School), science (Grades 4, 8, and High School), and social studies (High School). The NYSAA standard-setting meeting was held on June 11…

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has created tools and supports intended to help teachers adapt to the Common Core State Standards in English language arts and mathematics. The tools seek to find the right balance between encouraging teachers' creativity and giving them enough guidance to ensure quality. They are the product of two years of…

This article uses the analytic lens of power relations and models of power to examine how the participation of two students in an urban US eighth-grade English language arts class was symbolically and literally deleted. The researcher asks why do some students fail despite being placed in a technologically rich educational environment that…

To provide insight into the issue of multimodal literacy instruction, the authors explore presentation techniques and instructional activities employed in their secondary language arts classes. They collaborate on assignments that focus students on "anchored media instruction" and engage them in producing multimodal, technology-infused projects,…

In the English language arts classroom, social justice is a way to increase students' abilities to articulate their experiences, critique their world, and address those identified issues with subsequent action. Teachers who practice social justice education cultivate student voice through class activities, readings, assignments, and assessments…

This study sought to discover the crucial elements that make beginning teachers effective and lead to their retention in the field. While previous studies have approached these questions by gathering statistics, we pursued a case study approach based on open-ended, in-depth interviews of new teachers (1-5 years of experience) identified as…

Teaching for social justice is an increasingly popular emphasis among P-12 teachers and teacher educators alike. However, research suggests teachers, and especially beginning teachers, struggle to enact their social justice visions when faced with the myriad of mandates characteristic of today's classrooms. In this article the author examines how…

Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of the most widely taught texts in language arts classrooms through the English-speaking world and is greatly valued by many readers today for its depiction of youth grappling with racism in the American South of the Depression Era. However, the novel's subtle and sustained critique of…

In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) concluded that "literature reading is fading as a meaningful activity, especially among younger people." How can educators continue to teach students about the power of literary response when the priority is for them to achieve proficiency on standardized tests, whose scores can only be narrowly…

This study investigated the lived experiences of first-year college students who kept personal and private journals in an English composition course. The purpose of this study was to provide a description of the lived experiences of keeping those journals from the point-of-view of the journal writers themselves. Forty-eight students were involved…

With the pressure in education to develop a 21st century learner with higher-level thinking skills, many educators connected previous state curriculum to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Missouri's Department of Education experts paired the previous state's curriculum known as the Missouri Grade Level Expectations (MO GLEs) with a…

This report represents findings from a survey the Council did in which 36 Council member public school districts responded to questions regarding the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The survey covered a wide range of implementation areas including questions regarding districts' long-term CCSS implementation plans,…

Go in depth on Common Core Standards for middle schools to learn how they help students build on and extend skills acquired in earlier grades and prepare them for the nuanced communication and analytical work they will encounter in high school. Getting a copy for every teacher ensures they'll know: (1) The key focus areas of the Common Core…

Now that the Common Core standards are coming to just about every school, what every school leader needs is a straightforward explanation that lays out the benefits of the Common Core in plain English, provides a succinct overview, and gets everyone thinking about how to transition to this promising new paradigm. This handy, inexpensive booklet…

This article explores how one specially prepared, accomplished teacher managed dilemmas that arose as she worked to enact responsive language arts instruction with English Learners in a policy context that privileged high-stakes accountability and standardization. Drawing on sociocultural learning theory, the article illustrates how the teacher's…