Describes the Annual Book-Banning Project for 11th-grade English classes, a four-week project that tackles the issue of censorship by having students in groups prepare and carry out mock book-banning hearings. Describes how students integrate various skills and also experience the passion, hard work, cooperative planning, and group dynamics of a…

Describes a unit that allows students to recognize diversity, understand why diverse perspectives are held, and harness this diversity to improve society. Describes how students use and refine their literacy skills as they first research and report on Jamaica, and then use a Jamaican-created model to build a play that addresses a serious problem…

Describes how a high school teacher organized a summer voluntary reading club with her students. Discusses the club's theoretical underpinnings and considers factors behind its success. Describes how she selected texts for the club. Describes members and meetings in detail, and notes how the clubs changed her teaching. Discusses the club's…

Investigates the effectiveness of literature study groups with preservice teachers enrolled in a course on social foundations of American education. Describes introducing and using literature study groups in this class. Shows that 62% most liked "input from others"; 58% valued "gaining a variety of perspectives"; and 75% considered literature…

Describes several ways in which the newspaper is a useful resource for teaching reading skills and for allowing students to model just about all types of writing. (SR)

Describes a collaborative project between a young adult literature course for prospective school library media specialists and a ninth-grade literature class. Describes how the students corresponded weekly, writing about young adult books they had chosen from a list. Notes their reflections on this collaborative effort, and reports that it was…

Points out that a carefully developed checklist is a valuable writing aide that can help students and instructor focus on successful writing throughout the writing process. Shares five how-to steps as a guide for developing a writing checklist. (SR)

Describes four writing-to-learn strategies used in a content area reading class for preservice teachers: admit/exit slips, looping, cinquains/progressive cinquains, K-W-L (What I Know, What I Want to Know, and What I Learned). (SR)

Describes how Estonian language and literature have been taught at Russian-language schools in Estonia. Notes a lack of interesting reading materials, and describes how this instruction could be improved. (SR)

Presents a short excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver's book "High Tide in Tucson," intended as a read-aloud for adult beginning readers. Discusses the selection, why it was chosen, and specific activities (both language arts and other) that could grow out of this excerpt. (SR)

Presents (in the form of a conversation with "The Vampire") data on middle school students' attitudes toward literature circles, how they choose their groups for literature circles, patterns in the groups chosen, and how students selected the books they did. (SR)

Offers a basic introduction and overview of the Internet, explaining what it is and how teachers and students can use it in the classroom. Discusses learning to use the Internet, and using the Internet to promote reading and writing. (SR)

Reports on four low-income families enrolled in a summer family literacy pilot program. Describes how all of the families used literacy for meaningful purposes. Notes that the purposes and degrees of literacy used differed in connection with the social-contextual factors in their lives. (SR)

Provides a rationale for including biography projects in various secondary content areas. Describes a biography project assignment in a teacher education secondary content area literacy course. Provides examples of preservice teachers' work; makes connections to research about literacy and equity; and offers student comments about the assignment.…

Describes teaching preservice teachers how to use one specific content-reading strategy (summarization) when teaching high school math. Incorporates written reflections of three preservice teachers to describe how the content-reading strategy was implemented during a course-related field experience in three separate high school math classrooms.…