With the increased emphasis on college and career readiness resulting from the adoption of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the need for students to be able to read and write proficiently has become well established. Social studies teachers are now expected to teach nonfiction reading and writing skills in their content-area courses. Many…

This article highlights the use of Shaun Tan's "The Arrival" to teach literacy to English Language Learners in social studies classrooms. The featured text is a book that displays the complexity of migration within a text that does not feature a single written word. The author describes a variety of mini-lessons geared towards…

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…

The purpose of this investigation is to describe an implementation of a modeling task using mock data from an ancient archeological find. Students discover the relationship between the height of a person and his or her stride length. Qualitative data from student discussions document thinking and reasoning.

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…

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…

Teachers today are more aware of differences in the way students learn and that a wide variety of strategies must be employed when teaching. Major musical films, when appropriately excerpted, can provide an entertaining and unique way of addressing valid instruction objectives in both the cognitive and affective domains. In this article, the…

One of the most pressing problems that usually becomes apparent with the spread of junior high schools is that of articulation with both elementary and senior high schools. It is natural that during the introduction of a new unit like the junior high school into an educational system, attention is usually directed almost singly to the grades…

The self-defeating behavior of some students can often make even the most persistent of teachers to feel discouraged. The purpose of this article is to explain and provide a research-based rationale for the use of teacher verbal feedback prompts that convince students of their ability to succeed on a task. He discusses how to understand the…