Young adolescents have unique basic and developmental needs. Middle level educators are best able to reach and teach young adolescents when they understand students' needs and when the school environment, including its organizational structures and teacher practices, are responsive to these needs. Findings from a recently conducted…

Many students perceive science to be a difficult subject and are minimally engaged in learning it. This article describes a lesson that embedded an activity to engage students in learning science. It also identifies features of a science lesson that are likely to enhance students' engagement and learning of science and possibly reverse…

The arrival of underprepared freshmen to a high school presents a host of challenges for all stakeholders. West High School in Bakersfield, California, responded to a problem of academic failure of a significant number of freshmen by developing and implementing a Freshman Academy for underprepared students entering the 9th grade. During two years…

This article recounts what happened when one of the authors, a pre-service teacher, introduced a digital multimodal composition project in her 9th-grade inclusion English classes to support junior high students as they read the novel "To Kill a Mockingbird". Rather than regard new literacies as competing with print literacy for attention, the…

In this article, two in-service English teachers and two preservice English teachers, who participated in a shared mentoring relationship during the student-teaching semester, share their experiences, conflicts, and how they were resolved. The authors provide first-person narratives of all four teachers and suggestions for improving mentoring…

In this article, the authors reflect on the last 13 years of The Writers' Room, a program they developed for the Montclair Public Schools (New Jersey), which began officially in the spring of 1993 when a group of parents volunteered to become writing coaches for the newly detracked 9th grade English program. The idea was to help each writer find…