Travel provides students with multiple opportunities to learn about people, places, and the world around them. At times, students are given opportunities to travel causing them to be absent from the classroom. This manuscript provides a practical suggestion for engaging students in learning while on the journey. Students are asked to share and…

This article outlines suggestions for the use of self-reflective journaling as an assessment method in dance technique classes. The use of self-reflection makes assessment a part of the learning process, not an imposed evaluation of a student's final product, particularly when it is related to personal goal setting. The article provides practical…

Donald Graves's early professional books inspired Koshewa to look more deeply into student writing during the 1980s, and to value all phases of the writing process. Graves's perspective on uncovering and celebrating voice elevated Koshewa's writing instruction to a new plane. In this article, he writes about the impact that Donald Graves's work…

Adolescents with learning disabilities need explicit supports to improve their written expression, but those structures and supports are best utilized in an environment that promotes authentic writing resembling the writing students will produce in adult life and work. Classroom blogs may offer special educators an authentic context for writing…

This issue of "Stepping into the Classroom" reaches the broad ends of the spectrum of experience to showcase two authors who have worked hard to learn from personal experience and translate ideas into practice. Greg Van Nest, a veteran teacher of six years, had gone to many national conferences, but in Nashville in 2006, he came away knowing he…

Describes the use of anonymous daily journal entries (edited and graded at the end of the semester) in a literature survey course to nurture individual inquiry without sacrificing coverage. Maintains that anonymity encourages students to take risks, raise questions, and evaluate and shape the course. (SR)

Describes how a teachers uses children's literature to immerse students in the living past. Presents students' poems and excerpts from student journals to document students' reactions to using historical fiction in the classroom. (RS)

Describes how one high school teacher used journal writing and a paper to focus students awareness on prejudice and lack of human compassion in their own school. (SR)

Describes a journal writing activity designed to engage students in the exchange between text and reader. Argues that informal writing in a journal is a means of letting students find out that, if they engage themselves with a text, they will find it interesting. (RS)

Using math journals on a weekly basis in second- and third-grade classrooms allows students to proceed at their own rate to converge on an understanding of mathematical concepts using their own experiences. Such journals also provide teachers with a unique diagnostic tool. Students' journal entries regarding telling time and the concept of…

Describes a student's journal entry which discusses her response to a work of digital fiction. Reads the journal entry as a resistance narrative, an assemblage, a remediation, and an emergence. Reflects upon the changes in instruction and identity that occur in computer classrooms, online course supplements, and Internet classes. (PM)

The reader-response journal has proven useful in the literature-based composition class; it is also useful in the literature survey at the sophomore or junior level of college. Survey courses have a standard protocol that students have come to expect. In these classes, the teacher is an expert who lectures on historical background, trends, and…

Nassau Community College (NCC) offers a grammar course as a humanities option that may be taken instead of a literature course. The approach to the course incorporates reader-response theory, feminist criticism, new historicism, and journal writing as the key means for enabling students to learn. Each student has a notebook divided into sections…

Dialogue journals serve as a site where students may discover their own voices and learn to interact with each other and respond to ideas in a way that prepares them for their role as responsible citizens. Within the context of the dialogue journal, roles and role relationships are negotiated. The classroom community is decentralized; traditional…

Describes the crisis that young women face--a kind of suffocation--at adolescence, calling it both developmental and cultural. Argues that responsive teaching, and regular, fast, expressive writing without evaluation about whatever is in their minds will help girls define what is most important to them and examine what is going on in their lives.…