This article is a resource for educators looking to offer personal instruction and literacy opportunities to secondary students. It provides a thoughtful and in-depth look at the workshop model in a high school setting. It offers methods and suggestions for setting up the workshop model to methods and strategies for diverse learners. The…

With our expertise and experiences in teaching language development and early literacy instruction courses at a teacher education college, we argue that it is imperative to find ways to integrate learning standards with developmentally appropriate play-based methods. We examined what literacy coach candidates found in their classroom observations…

Many elementary teachers include a thematic unit on families as a part of their yearly curriculum. During student teaching new practitioners may be tempted to choose only family-themed books within their experiential background and comfort level (Gay, 2002). However, culturally responsive teachers entering our highly diverse classrooms need to…

Technology is changing the ways we write memoir, and teachers can be incorporating new forms into their teaching of writing. Newer forms of memoir such as zines and blogs are also becoming part of classroom practices, and, as teachers, we must be ready to engage and support students in such endeavors. This paper addresses three topics, all of…

In a test-driven society such as ours, the reasons not to take on the time-consuming and controversial topic of critical literacy are many; however, this article hopes to convince educators at all levels that the benefits of engaging students in questioning, reflecting, and taking action are well worth the effort. The article begins with a…

Cultures determine identity in that they prescribe the "food, festivals, and fashion" of their members; for example, rap music, baggy pants and gestured dancing identify the hip hop culture (recognizable to both "members" and "non-members"). Cultural identities are created and maintained by "literacy"--the…

Literature study discussions have been included in many instructional frameworks for the past twenty years. As classroom teachers struggled to get quality discussions going, researchers and educators offered a variety of pedagogical approaches, theoretical considerations, and instructional resources to support their efforts. While the use of…

Christopher Paul Curtis is an internationally known author of books loved by young adult readers. "The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963" and "Bud, Not Buddy" have now been joined by "Bucking the Sarge," Curtis' newest book. This article will share information about each of the texts, as well as how they can be used in…

Sharing concerns and interests of New York State educators in the improvement of literacy, this annual journal raises educational issues such as: empowering students' voices; responding to the call for higher standards by instructing and including all learners; using the Internet to promote literacy; and poetry as a powerful genre. Articles in the…

The purpose of the present investigation was to sample the range of texts selected by 21 students in sustained silent reading in a single fourth-grade classroom. Using a sampling technique developed by French and Foster (1992), single pages from sampled texts were evaluated. The evaluation found that most students were reading fiction (n = 14),…