Historically, male students have been known to score lower than their female counterparts in reading and writing on standardized measures of academic success. While scholars, teachers, and even policymakers have attempted to explain and mitigate this gender gap in reading and writing scores, male students have had little opportunity to offer their…

The purpose of this action research study was to investigate the writing instruction of teachers in ninth grade English and Social Studies classes at DMV High School, a private school in which students matriculate from over one hundred different feeder schools. The participants and collaborators in cycle 1 were teachers and student in a sampling…

Literacy scholars have called for writing instruction to promote civic engagement, student agency, and multimodal composing. This study addressed this call by describing a research-practice partnership to reimagine writing instruction in a high school English course by incorporating human-centered design challenges. Using case study methods, we…

This essay explores an English lesson I taught to a Year 9 class in which students drew upon and narrativised personal experiences. I describe and examine the literary sociability of the lesson, by which I mean the social and cultural exchanges that give shape to students' reading and writing. In doing so, I demonstrate the need for policymakers…

This action research explores the use of Readers'-Writers' Workshop (RWW) in the secondary English classroom. RWW often requires a paradigm shift on the part of the teacher to allow for more student autonomy and limiting direct instruction time. The researcher sought to discover whether or not this model would impact the engagement level and the…

The purpose of this action research was to evaluate implementation of the flipped classroom model in a high school English classroom. The flipped classroom model is a specific blended teaching and learning approach that has been shown to increase student achievement, close the achievement gap, and increase student engagement and critical thinking.…

This document presents the proceedings of the 29th Annual Research Forum held June 26, 2025, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Included are the following eight action research papers: (1) The Influence of Cross-Curricular Pedagogy on Student Engagement in ELA Classrooms (Anna Breaugh); (2) The Influence of Guided Free…

Many high schools in the United States are contending with modest student writing achievement and looking for ways to enhance teachers' writing instruction. This is especially the case for schools deemed to be "underperforming" and struggling to reform writing pedagogy against an accumulation of teacher and leadership turnover, limited…

Writing instruction is a particular challenge because there is no singular, linear solution to teaching students to write well. This book approaches writing as a wicked problem that takes place in complicated contexts. Through both scholarly research and teacher reflection, it examines ELA classrooms and the experiences of writing teachers to…

Any single artifact in a museum possesses the potential to serve as a starting point for the viewer to interpret its meaning, develop an idea, and then generate a written piece. In this article, the authors describe steps for using a photography exhibit collection as artifactual inquiry.

Background: This case study examined the consequences of a literacy initiative designed to improve writing instruction for a high school under pressure to increase standardised test scores or face government oversight. Realities of underperforming schools, such as interruptions to instructional time, a focus on formulaic essay writing and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the difference of self-perception of teaching effectiveness in terms of beliefs about the nature of writing and about student learning outcomes between high school and college instructors who teach dual credit English 1301 by face-to-face instructional method in Texas public community colleges. After a…

This paper uses data from a larger study in response to recent literature regarding teacher professional identity. In the study, perspectives of teachers from four high schools in two states were examined through a cross-case study. Triangulated data affirmed that teaching is not easily understood by a single theoretical perspective. Additionally,…

This article serves as an invitation to see the way the teaching of biography-driven writing has been increasingly pushed out of the secondary English Language Arts (ELA) curriculum in favor of highly structured, formulaic, and impersonal writing, and how this is a setback for students in their preparation for college and career writing. The…

Developmental interventions for reading and writing often take place at community colleges during the winter or summer. These brief, intersession workshops are examples of compressed acceleration, as they give students the opportunity to exit developmental coursework and enroll in credit bearing courses the following semester. As college readiness…