This paper explores enabling conditions for scaling high-quality project-based learning (PBL) to understand factors that influence how PBL spreads, whether and how it can be sustained and the extent to which it informs meaningful change in schools. We report on a year-long collaboration across three research projects. Each project team analyzed…

Drawing on my work in the U.S., I briefly discuss four related hallmarks of teaching for social justice in diverse classrooms, supported by research on their impact on students. They include explicitly recognizing and working with students' culture as a basis for learning, teaching key concepts in the curriculum through content and examples drawn…

This case study describes how a high school language arts teacher in a poor border community in southern New Mexico combined technology-based teaching strategies with multicultural elements to ensure learning and equitable access to technology for her minority students. Discusses bilingual and bicultural students, constructivist classrooms, and…

Describes the challenges and rewards of working with Amy (an eighth-grade girl considered autistic) in a team-taught language arts class that functions in the workshop format and that includes learners with special needs. Describes Amy's progress and setbacks, and notes the importance of the workshop format for her progress and for her teacher's…

Pragmatic epistemology of focal teacher thinking appears tightly shaped by modular connections between task domains and pragmatic organizers. Discussions with a group of language teachers identified four domains of tasks: (1) oral activities; (2) writing activities; (3) reading activities; and (4) language technique activities (grammar, spelling).…

This lesson offers students experience in making historical meaning from eyewitness accounts that present a range of different perspectives. Students begin with a case study in working with alternative reports of a single event: the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. First, they compare two newspaper reports on the fire, then two memoirs of the fire…

Offering glimpses into an English teacher's unorthodox teaching style, this book presents the story of one woman's dedication to her energetic, unruly students and challenges teachers to find their own unique genius within personal and institutional limitations. The book discusses how the teacher (who has spent her entire career at one school)…

Using the subjects of language arts and English in the secondary school setting, this collection of essays should inspire the development and refinement of teacher education at all levels and in all subject areas. The essays are written in the voices of public school teachers and grounded in everyday theory and practice of faculty in public…

This volume is a longitudinal study that explores the responses of two experienced high school English teachers to curriculum changes and examines how a teacher's past attitudes and experiences influence current practice. There are six chapters. The first is a discussion of narrative inquiry as a research method. The next two chapters are…