Frustrated by her students' glib use of catch-all terms such as 'militarism' in addressing causation, Alexia Michalaki wanted her Year 9 students to produce mature causal explanations of World War I. To encourage this to happen she went back into decades of pedagogical writing and research, teasing out the ways in which others have sought to…

The authors, youth leaders in Philadelphia and New York, believe that researchers can do a better job of listening to and including youth in their research. Since October 2021 they have been collecting essays from high school students (and some middle school and college students too) written during this time of community, national, and global…

How better can we prepare students for the roles awaiting them as citizens than by engaging them in addressing challenging issues of the day? We describe our experience as a researcher--practitioner partnership with this objective in a yearlong program involving academically low-performing urban middle schoolers and a student-centered…

Education for citizenship is more important than ever. The author describes a technology-supported curriculum that engages young teens in electronic discourse with peers on significant personal and societal issues and assists them in decision making on topics ranging from their personal futures to the futures of their communities, nation, and…

Picture a group of classroom teachers gathered around a table late one afternoon discussing the results of the statewide writing assessment, the returned scored papers scattered across the table top. This article details research exploring which rhetorical elements are associated with statewide assessment scores and considers the role and…

Setting out to teach Magna Carta to the full attainment range in Year 7, Mark King decided to choose a question that reflected real scholarly debates and also to ensure that pupils held enough knowledge in long-term memory to be able to think about that question meaningfully. As he gradually prepared his pupils to produce their own causation…

Rachel Foster and Kath Goudie's search for a more rigorous and interesting way of teaching Year 7 the Norman Conquest was initially driven by a desire to incorporate local history in a more meaningful way in their Key Stage 3 schemes of work. This search culminated in a collaboration with an academic historian, Stephen Baxter. In this article they…

Lucy Moonen set out to explore whether collaborative writing in small groups, facilitated by the use of Google Docs, would help to sustain students' focus on essay writing as the development of an historical argument. She explains how she set up an essay on the League of Nationals as a collaborative task and demonstrates how the technology enabled…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) emphasize disciplinary literacy by making literacy instruction every teacher's responsibility (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010). The CCSS require content area teachers to adapt curriculum and pedagogy to support disciplinary literacy…

This column features essays written by current middle school and high school teachers, media specialists, librarians, literacy coaches, curriculum specialists, administrators, preservice teachers, teacher educators, and adolescent and adult learners. They highlight diverse perspectives on teaching and/or learning with literacies to inspire reader…

In the summer of 2009, this author devised a Saturday program with an emphasis on writing for publication targeting three students as his nucleus. One of the students, Mariano, was the only one of the three to accept the invitation. This was a strong indication of his passion for writing. Thus, three weeks before school began, the author and…

This column features essays written by current middle school and high school teachers, media specialists, librarians, literacy coaches, curriculum specialists, administrators, preservice teachers, teacher educators, and adolescent and adult learners. They highlight diverse perspectives on teaching and/or learning with literacies to inspire reader…

Following the No Child Left Behind Act (2001), which mandates standards-based accountability for the academic progress of all students, much attention has been given to integrating language and content instruction for English learners (ELs) in K-12 classrooms in the US. Although TESOL and other state-approved language proficiency standards…

This article describes the author's experience co-facilitating a project for which seventh-grade students designed and created original video games based on Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time". The author provides an overview of recent literature on video game implementation in the classroom and explains how the project was designed and…

This study extended the work on curriculum-based measurement to examine the criterion-related validity of curriculum-based measures in written expression for middle school students, the differences in validity coefficients for various lengths of text, and the sensitivity of curriculum-based measures to change in student performance.…