Determined to shift the balance by providing a venue for students' voices, Cordi and Masturzo reclaimed and remade a Web space to address bullying using digital storytelling (Ohler, 2009). Using "Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories", they guided their undergraduate students on a valuable journey of self-exploration, reflection, and…

This column provides an overview of the Common Core text exemplars and gives examples of ways teachers can group text exemplars and other trade books in ways that will support middle graders' understanding of complex texts. Building background by supplementing text exemplars with other titles is particularly emphasized. Suggestions for grouping…

New literacies are affecting the ways that we choose to spend our time in teaching and learning. In this article, Hagood describes the work of nine middle grades teachers' explorations of new literacies, including digital technologies and pop culture, and their implementations in their content area instruction. She also highlights some of the…

This article synthesizes 15 years of research in middle school classrooms that have started to integrate new literacies into their daily teaching and learning. Trends of the data suggest there are certain salient characteristics of middle school teachers and students in these grade levels that make such innovations more successful with them than…

As adolescents spend more and more time engaging in various on line activities, teachers are questioning the role that language arts curricula might play in helping them become savvy technology users. In this study, an eighth-grade teacher responded to her students' unauthorized participation on MySpace[TM] by initiating an inquiry into social…

A middle school language arts teacher reflects on his experience in utilizing a school-housed online social network to create avenues for authentic audience, purpose, and response to student writing. With many technology proponents advocating a 21st century education, the fact that interacting with the Web 2.0 environment is essentially a reading…

Using new literacies critically can be an excellent pedagogy for motivating and empowering students who feel alienated from their school and society. This article describes how one middle school teacher engaged his inner-city English language learners with critical media literacy as a way of making their learning more meaningful and motivating.…

The authors describe the steps they took to ramp up their efforts to reach out to students by retooling their teaching. Four factors became essential: the use of writing as a tool for engagement and learning, the necessity to prepare students to compete in an increasingly digitized world, the motivational appeal of the graphic novel genre, and the…

A collaborative team of five international teacher educators/researchers examine the importance of student voice for authentic discourse and instructional design in contemporary classrooms. Excerpts from their perspectives on teaching, research, and innovative programs are woven together and include suggested Actions/Reflections for the reader.…

This article describes one middle school teacher's use of literature circles using heterogeneous grouping. It begins with a brief rationale for using literature circles in the language arts classroom. Next, it describes techniques to form literature circles. Then, it shares how to build and establish a supportive environment within each group. It…

As both a teacher and a parent, Ranck-Buhr knows a little something about working with students and keeping them engaged in the reading and writing processes... even recalling a son who was a reluctant book-report writer until he was offered some choice of reading material. She suggests practical ways to implement two vital elements in the…

A primary task of teachers is to promote the culture of collaboration in classrooms. That's because we are smarter together than we are alone. But for teachers to leverage the unique social capacity of classrooms, they need to understand how to create situations requiring and rewarding collaboration (like that of inquiry), how to structure groups,…

This article chronicles how the process of reviewing and grading student written work became an integral part of a middle school teacher's writing workshop practice. In addition to discussing how reading student work can bring educators back to the heart of the profession (including the belief that spending time with drafts can reap more rewards…

Reluctant and struggling readers, many of whom are boys, are placed in reading intervention classes; however, often the environmental conditions of these intervention classrooms are not conducive for fostering a student's love for reading. This article describes Cambourne's optimal conditions for literacy learning and the results from implementing…

Based on her experiences with the transformation of 8th-grade reading in one school, Ivey advocates for a substantial shift in what students read in English class and what is available to them in school. Middle school classrooms are in dire need of a book makeover, and this should be the first order of business when considering what to do for…