The current high-stakes educational context compels many schools and school systems to encourage teachers to use restrictive literacy teaching practices, which are unlikely to meet students' diverse needs. These restrictions typically fall on novice teachers, who enter the field through various preparation routes, because they often work in…

This qualitative study explored reasons K-6 teachers did or did not engage students regularly in writing. Interviews with 14 teachers, classified as high, transitional, and low implementers of writing instruction, revealed three themes: hindrances and helps, beliefs concerning practice, and preparation and professional development. Both high and…

This qualitative inquiry examined 14 secondary preservice teachers' emerging understandings of disciplinary literacy. Data included preservice teachers' written reflections and annotated lesson plans, which were analyzed for understanding of discipline-specific habits of thinking, texts, reading and writing demands of academic texts,…

This study describes the tutoring interactions of four early childhood preservice tutors, two able and two less able, to document the tutoring strategies they applied as they provided support for their first-grade student at point of need. The two more able tutors provided various prompts to foster their students' use of strategies, thus…

While there has been growing interest in the last few years to address the literacy needs of adolescents, this interest comes when alarming numbers of students are challenged by academic literacy demands in high school. Many students entering high school without passing state assessment examinations are required to take developmental reading…

As teacher educators, we continue to focus on tutoring experiences as ways to help tutors connect coursework to practice. This study presents a preservice tutoring program designed to provide a field-based experience where the tutors would be able to (a) learn about literacy instruction, (b) use a multitude of assessment data rather than…

An online survey of award-winning literacy teachers was conducted to determine the most influential qualities of literacy teacher educators in teacher preparation programs. Sixty-two recipients of literacy awards participated in the study, representing teachers of excellence from all U.S. geographic regions. Using a backward mapping process,…

Through a case-study approach, the authors focus on understanding the complexity of teachers' knowledge development, particularly as it pertains to teachers' beliefs about literacy development and their teaching practices in literacy. Participants of the study are middle-school teachers who shared their beliefs and practices through (1) a…

In this study, 38 preservice teachers enrolled in two sections of a language and literacy course at a small university in Montana were paired as pen pals with 14 fourth graders in Kansas. The purpose of the research project was to determine in what ways and contexts the literate identities of the children emerged through letter exchanges with the…

A literacy education professor teams up with a colleague whose specialization is technology and education to analyze students' contributions to a graduate course taught online for the first time. This article explains the modifications that the instructor made to a face-to-face course to adapt it to an online learning environment. The online…

Many students with reading difficulties have a specific learning disability called dyslexia, which is neurobiological in origin and characterized by problems with spelling, decoding, and accurate/fluent word identification, negatively impacting vocabulary growth and comprehension. Consequently, the role of the insightful teacher is critical in…

Much has been written to convince content-area teachers to include literacy instruction as part of their regular content instruction. The purpose of this study was to determine how the messages available in the literature are framed and how they might be viewed by content-area teachers, especially mathematics teachers. The analysis revealed that…