Neighborhood Bridges is a nationally recognized literacy program using storytelling and creative drama to help children develop their critical literacy skills and to transform them into storytellers of their own lives. In 2012-2013, a total of 640 students in grades three through six from twenty-three classrooms in eleven schools across the…

In 2010-2011, students in twenty-five classrooms from eleven schools in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area participated in The Children's Theatre Company's Neighborhood Bridges (Bridges) program. The Children's Theatre Company contracted with the University of Minnesota's Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement (CAREI) to…

Improving teacher effectiveness is a key strategy to ensure student readiness for college and careers and to address achievement gaps and persistent low performance. In response to the new Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA) the National Writing Project (NWP) created a professional development (PD) program to support…

This article describes Project Athena, a Javits program funded by the U.S. Department of Education and developed through the Center for Gifted Education at the College of William and Mary. Project Athena seeks to find ways to help impoverished children develop advanced skills in reading comprehension, literary analysis, and persuasive writing. Its…