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…

Supportive, respectful teacher-student interactions are essential to a positive learning environment for linguistically and culturally diverse students. In this article, I focus on one case from a larger study that examined the teaching practices and perspectives of four secondary teachers of immigrant-origin students of generation 1.0, 1.5, and…

From uneven digital access and growing academic gaps to reports of students missing or disengaged since March 2020, it is evident that English Learners (ELs) have endured some of the pandemic's gravest impacts on students across the United States. But because the pandemic has affected state assessment systems as well as instruction, it is…

Austin Film Festival's Digital Storytelling Curriculum examines the art of storytelling as a critical tool for communication. Developed collaboratively with Austin Film Festival and Austin Independent School District secondary English teachers, Digital Storytelling is nine-week, English language arts screenwriting curriculum in which all students…

This article focuses on a collective case study of two teachers attending a professional development workshop focused on writing for publication via educational blogs. Through a qualitative study, we sought to understand how attending the workshop and publishing on a national organization's blog shaped the two teachers' own identities as teachers…

Historical fiction is often used as a resource in elementary classrooms to integrate social studies and English-Language Arts (ELA), a practice that teachers often use as a time-saver when schedules are limited for social studies in an elementary classroom. Using historical fiction as a basis for integration can give students more opportunities to…

The aim of this study was to determine whether the reliability of raters was provided by assessing reading prosody using the Multidimensional Fluency Scale (MDFS). The study was completed with a cross-sectional design, and in line with this, the prosodic reading skills of 41 fifth-grade students were rated by elementary school classroom teachers…

"Integrating Social and Emotional Learning with Content" builds a framework for creatively and effectively using picture books to integrate social and emotional learning (SEL) with teaching across content areas. Thoughtful book choices in mixed-ability early elementary classrooms have the power to not only support gifted students as they…

The purpose of the current research study was to investigate the extent to which student performance was influenced by the disruption to learning that occurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To explain observed differences in performance, we compared outcomes from a state-wide summative testing program between students who were administered the…

Most students with disabilities have reading difficulties and perform significantly lower than their peers without disabilities on low- and high-stakes reading achievement tests. Out of 23 studies on the supplemental Lexia Core5 Reading computer-assisted instruction (CAI) program intervention, 21 studies showed positive reading outcomes for…

Students in the local school district have continued to score below the state average on the standardized American Literature end-of-course (EOC) assessment. It was unclear what 9th-, 10th-, and 11th-grade teachers in the district were doing to prepare students for success on the American Literature EOC. The purpose of this basic qualitative study…

The purpose of this action research was to evaluate how the implementation of asynchronous online discussions into the classroom impacts the critical thinking skills of secondary language arts students. Although critical thinking has shown to be an important 21st century skill (Paul & Elder, 2002), many students are leaving high school lacking…

Most public K-12 schools in the United States enact a school improvement plan each year based upon the state testing results from the previous year. Despite the many frameworks, research, and recommendations, few scholars tackled what the plans contain and the results. Using a sequential explanatory mixed methods model, two stages examined school…

The purpose of this quantitative non-experimental cross-sectional study was to examine the possible relationship between students' autonomy, students' competence, and student-teacher relatedness, and their performance on ELA and math high-stakes tests. The self-determination theory was employed to guide the study. This study collected…

Following the emergence of chatbots, especially ChatGPT, researchers have begun to examine their capabilities, credibility, and reliability in educational context. In this study, ChatGPT and Google Gemini are used as technological tools to create 7th-grade lesson plans for mathematics, science, literature, and social studies classes. Using…