Weber issues a challenge to teachers grappling with the demands (and failures) of NCLB, and asks them to make certain that advanced and gifted readers are not left behind. To that end, she shares characteristics of gifted readers, ways to support them, and tips for teaching that will result in doing "a much better job of providing appropriate…

A brief history of NCLB and the resultant scripted reading programs shows how hollow these fixes are when you eliminate teacher responsibility, professional judgment, and flexibility. The authors caution, "In some cases, we do think that these programs can be successful, but only if the teacher has the power as an educator to adjust the…

Response to Intervention (RTI) is a term we hear more often these days, and it applies largely to students who fall under the purview of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Shanklin urges us to consider three questions: What students are we talking about? Whose responsibility are these students? What interventions might be helpful,…

Radcliffe describes how one middle school teacher works with her struggling eighth-grade readers to break the cycle of failure and begin new literacy lives. Five principles guided her over-age middle school students toward success after years of failure: accepting the challenge, building strong teacher-student relationships, creating literacy-rich…

Packaged programs for direct instructional reading are becoming the norm, even as research supports SSR as a successful way to enhance student reading achievement "and student attitudes" toward reading. DeBenedictis shows us how she has achieved goals set by NCLB while using SSR in her classroom, adaptations of SSR and the research that…

Some journeys that the author and his colleagues take are by choice and others are forced upon them. Some they take because their hearts, minds, and spirits are drawn to the "rightness" of what lies ahead. Others are done out of obligation and still others rest in their compliance to the demands of others. This article is actually about…

In our enthusiasm for teaching English to English Language Learners, we often forget to celebrate the multiple cultures and languages in our classrooms. Sumaryono and Ortiz help us walk this fine line, offering advice, examples, and resources for maintaining a critical but often-overlooked area--cultural identity.