The literacy design collaborative (LDC) was created to support teachers in implementing college and career readiness standards. Teachers work collaboratively with coaches to further develop their expertise and design standards-driven, literacy-rich writing assignments within their existing curriculum across content areas. The current paper reports…

This paper describes a unit designed to promote the development of narrative writing skills among 5th grade students through the use of LEGO robotics. Over the course of four, two and one-half hour sessions (one day per week for four consecutive weeks), the students learned how to construct and program robots, write and present a proposal to…

In this study, mathematical stories written by 50 middle school students were analyzed. The study group consisted of two different student groups who were living in advantageous and disadvantageous regions in Istanbul. At the first stage, the students were presented a mathematical story called "My Fractal Tree", then told about what the…

While the United States has a divisive history around the separation of church and state in public school, current national and state teaching standards do include curricular objectives related to the study of religion. This paper focuses on the ways a diverse group of sixth-grade public schoolchildren engaged with religious content in their…

Writing allows students to clarify their thinking. Through the process of writing, students recognize what they know and what they still need to learn. This article describes how a middle school mathematics teacher and language arts teacher worked with a secondary content area literacy professor during a specific writing assignment. The "How-to"…

When a language arts curriculum provided students with the opportunity to translate meaning across sign systems (that is, from poetry to dance), numerous benefits were noted. Transmediation, the translation of meaning from one sign system to another, led students to analyze compositional structures and to enhance their use of academic language…

To teach science writing effectively, scholars encourage combining writing to learn with applications of the science writing heuristic. How teachers learn to do so remains under-examined. This essay follows a cohort of ninth-grade science teachers who collaborated in a project to develop, test, and revise such a combination of writing prompts for…

Today it is necessary to approach environmental topics with students in an interdisciplinary manner to mitigate the environmental damages that the Earth is suffering. In this paper we report an action-research and innovation study aimed at sensitizing students with respect to the care and preservation of the environment through the writing of…

How does one turn a class of sixth graders who are uncomfortable with writing, unfamiliar with art supplies, but good at fidgeting and bickering, into a community that achieves literary, artistic, and civic success? In the spring of 2003, Kestrel Heights teachers asked the authors to team up and help their sixth grade students create something…