How can comedy be used as an effective tool and truly help innovate the learning experience? This paper outlines how aspects of comedy have been creatively integrated into primary and secondary academic curricula such as English Language Arts, social studies, drama, as well as in areas of mental health and wellness. The essay demonstrates, for…

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…

Based on the relevant research that highlights the impact of pairing fiction and nonfiction texts around a specific theme or a topic for enhanced motivation and reading comprehension for English learners (ELs), this article describes ways to combine texts of various genres to promote ELs' language and literacy development. A middle school example…

Writing about mathematics holds a wealth of benefits for students. When students are given opportunities to write in math class, it helps develop mathematical thinking and language, encourages self-reflection, and provides a better way to organize ideas. Many teachers incorporate journaling and other types of reflective writing into their…

Over the last couple of years, White nationalist groups have been at the forefront of American political life, especially with the events in Charlottesville, Virginia. The historical roots of White nationalist movements run deep in the United States and are most closely associated with the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). In this article the authors explore…

This follow-up report provides a revised Literacy Assignment Analysis Framework that incorporates discussion and teacher scaffolding. This new framework serves as a guidepost for studying sets of assignments across multiple days or weeks within a single classroom, school, or district. A closer look at more assignments from real classrooms provides…

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…

Literature that provokes readers to engage in activism is the author's favorite type of writing. For years she has celebrated the tradition of counterculture authors who advocated for a cause, using narratives to educate the world and elicit change. As a culminating project after a year of embracing dialogue and promoting writing for power, she…

In this era of high-stakes testing and densely packed state standards, it is too easy for writing to become a meaningless process, useful only for school. Many strategies can help to get all students writing, but this author set out to find a strategy to help students see the power of writing and to know that their voices matter. Writing groups…

Health educators in elementary and secondary schools should seek collaborations with teachers of other subjects to enhance health education curriculum. The strategy described in this article details a potential collaboration between health education and language arts units. The activity enhances both drug education knowledge gains and creative…

A successful middle school team of teachers employed effective middle level philosophy to structure a curriculum around themes that were relevant, challenging, integrative, and engaging for their particular students and community. Realizing that their young adolescents were involved in tough, delicate issues in their out-of-school lives, the…

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…

If students are not in the classroom, they can't learn. The author serves a dual role of teacher and administrator for middle school and high school students who are at high risk for academic failure. Their academic difficulties are mainly due to their negative behavioral patterns, which lead to frequent absences from class. Negative in-class…

"Invisible Girls" is an examination of twenty-four at-risk adolescent girls' writing practices in a Third Space setting located within a school but outside of the confines of a regular classroom. Through a description of the girls' writing over a three-and-a-half-year period in this setting, Mellinee Lesley details phenomena that both support and…

If reading teachers are letting struggling readers do minimal writing in reading classes, then this practice falls under iatrogenic teaching practices, i.e., practices based on good intentions that produce unintended negative consequences. The problem arises when reading teachers believe their students' writing should take place under the purview…