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…

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 takes us inside two urban middle school classrooms where the majority of students speak African American English. In addition to exploring the nature of literacy instruction inside Mrs. Baird's and Ms. Lawson's classrooms, we examine both teachers' underlying beliefs with respect to language, literacy, and learning. This inquiry…

This piece explores the instructional possibilities of picturebooks in middle grade classrooms, illustrating the central tenets of how to effectively introduce these resources to middle grade students. Through today's multiplicity of illustrated texts, students can discover the finest uses of language, as well as encounter images that inform,…

This article reports on the findings of a photography and literacy project ("Through Students' Eyes") the authors conducted with middle level English language learners and alternative high school youth from a mid-Atlantic (US) ex-urban area. In order to bridge middle and high school settings, the authors used multimodal and photo…

Pursuing student voice in your design of curriculum helps students take more ownership of their learning. Gaynor and Shanklin developed an open-ended survey to gather information about students' growing understandings of the purposes for reading and writing and to solicit feedback about the year's activities. The survey is presented here, along…

This qualitative study of sixth graders in a language arts classroom explores how interpreting poems for choral reading deepened, enriched, and expanded their interpretations of poetry. Key factors in the process included students' sense of freedom to interpret poetry in multiple ways, listening to their own and others' voices speaking the lines…

This article explores collaboration between a rural school in upstate New York and an international school in Amman, Jordan. The authors describe how they provided their students with real audiences for their writing, and, over time, built an international community of writers. Classroom walls were blurred as the authors "team-taught"…

This paper explores the ways one school continues to enhance both literacy and service-learning through the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals. Over the course of their middle-school years, young adolescents at Canterbury School visit a range of sites in the community. They also explore service-learning at home and around the world by…

This study examines unintended consequences during a 6th-grade book club discussion of Bette Bao Lord's (1984) In the Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson. The participants modeled a book club discussion, otherwise known as the fish bowl, for a newly enrolled student. Unintended consequences occurred within the realm of deviating from the rules of…

Online classes are a viable option in today's educational landscape, but are they right for your school and students? This article reviews the status of online education, 21st century skills, best practices in online education, and online classes as experienced by a middle school student and parent. (Contains 2 figures.)

This article explores our work with African American youth in an after-school community literacy program. We examine how a group of these students used a set of Internet-based technology tools to evaluate whether or not a group of colleges would affirm their cultural identity and help them succeed. What we learned from the students has caused us…

The increased focus on reading strategies has had a number of unintended consequences, including the creation of strategy worksheets and isolated strategy instruction. We explore these unintended consequences and provide examples of how middle school teachers can engage students in authentic reading comprehension instruction that results in…

An expert on vocabulary instruction, Allen reviews what we know as a profession to be of value to students and offers three types of practices that demonstrate meaningful vocabulary instruction. She also describes how vocabulary words can be used as a rich source of assessment. (Contains 1 figure.)