In this article, the author describes her use of dramatic performance to promote tellability in narrative writing within a seventh and eighth grade English and language arts classroom. By experiencing dramatic performance, the students were able to actively and physically perform the writing process: brainstorming, drafting, revising, and editing.…

Teachers' classroom management practices are rooted in assumptions based on their experiences and perceptions. At times, these assumptions are only partially informed, and serve to limit action and perceived responsibility. In this article, five common "half-truths" that guide classroom management are discussed. For each, the basic premise is…

It is widely accepted that including writing activities in the learning process positively impacts student achievement and leads to greater depth of student understanding. This writing is often missing in the math classroom though, when the focus is misplaced on rote procedures. In these classrooms students learn mathematical processes but have…

School bullying, also referred to as peer victimization, has increased rapidly in recent years and can be extremely harmful if schools and teachers do not establish effective bullying-prevention programs. Recent data on the number of students who are victims of bullying indicate that between 30 and 80 percent of students in schools report being…

The ethnic violence that occurred in the former Yugoslavia during the mid-1990s has become one of the defining events of recent history. As such, today's students should develop an awareness of the history of that situation and its implications for contemporary society. Because textbooks provide the structure of most high school history courses,…

Despite a continuing record of interest over the years, few studies have documented the demographics of grade retention or the relationship between it and academic achievement across multiple grades and groups of students. In this research, we were interested in the characteristics and consequences of retaining students in elementary (K-5) and…

This study connected secondary-education teacher candidates with diverse populations through community-based service learning activities in the first year of college. Through this experience these students learned more about themselves and most importantly about others. They expressed increased cultural competence that reinforced their desire to…

Teachers, parents, and librarians are constantly looking for methods and materials that engage students as readers and motivate them to increase the time they spend reading. In this article we describe findings from a study of middle schoolers' magazine reading habits that gave us a close look at the power of magazines as supplemental supports for…

Projected employment reports indicate that most new jobs will involve occupations in which computer skills are essential, but surveys reveal that many people with a disability currently lack these computer skills. One way to address the gap is to prepare students while they are attending primary and secondary school. The National Business…

Once hired, beginning teachers face the daunting and demanding task of setting up a classroom and becoming a teacher that influences student achievement in positive ways. This article addresses some of these challenges and provides meaningful suggestions for principals and administrators hoping to support, sustain, and retain their novice teachers.

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…

This article presents guiding principles governing the design, implementation, and management of a point system to promote discipline and academic rigor in a secondary classroom. Four considerations are discussed: (1) assigning appropriate point values to integral classroom behaviors and tasks; (2) determining the relationship among consequences,…

Content-area literacy involves the use of research-based learning strategies that help students effectively and efficiently gain content knowledge. Its use is fundamental to all content areas, not just to those that rely heavily on printed materials. One of the major goals of content-area instruction is to produce critical thinkers and problem…

Disruptive behaviors negatively impact learning by taking time away from classroom instruction (Gottlieb and Polirstok 2005) and may also produce unsafe school environments. This study examined changes in the number of office disciplinary referrals (ODRs) received in public schools prior to and following the schools partnering with one particular…

This article examines the merits of WebQuests in facilitating students' in-depth understanding of science concepts using the four principles of learning gathered from the National Research Council reports "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School" (1999) and the "How Students Learn: Science in the Classroom" (2005) as an analytic…