In his foundational work, "English Composition and Rhetoric," Alexander Bain set forth the framework for what students and teachers now routinely refer to as the five-paragraph essay. Teachers were so inculcated with Bain's paradigm for the "perfect" essay format, they in turn have inculcated their students, and they just say now, "Write an…

With Kentucky's adoption of the national core standards, literacy in all content areas has received a new and revived focus in our state. Students of all grade levels are expected to be able to communicate complex ideas with clarity of focus that has not been necessary in the past. The music educator must be able to adapt and grow in order to keep…

Writing program administrators need to be as concerned about sustaining the cultural ecologies of our communities as we are about the material economies of our institutions--we need to attend to the diverse linguistic and rhetorical ecologies within which twenty-first century student writers are exercising agency. In order to respond productively,…

Learners occasionally complain that they lack ideas when sitting down to write a composition. Teachers complain that they do not want to spend half the class time telling students what to write. There is an answer. Teachers brainstorm words connected with the topic in class before setting the composition for homework. The question remains: how to…

This article describes a method--Collaborative Civics Conference Protocol (3CP)--that teachers can use with any civics education program to engage students in meaningful collaborative assessment of each others' thinking and writing and to make connections between civics activities and essential social studies content. Borrowing from the Writer's…

As familiar and widely used elements of second language pedagogy that can be leveraged in interesting new ways through the use of digital technology. The focus is on a set of affordances offered by Google Drive, a popular online storage and document-sharing technology. On the assumption that dynamic collaboration with peers, teacher feedback, and…

It hardly bears noting that when writing instructors teach professional writing they focus on helping students learn to analyze complex communication scenarios, conduct careful research to support their position, and to responsibly and succinctly apply the process of writing any number of supporting documents. Developing these skills are essential…

In this "prosumer" era in which people seem always to be producing and consuming texts, words matter as much as--or more than--they ever have. Learning how grammar works in the texts they read and write is essential to students' literacy. It is time to reframe English teachers' view to include both writing "and" reading as contexts for grammar…

From penmanship, to product, to process...this article recounts 100 years of instructional practice in the US elementary writing classroom through the voices of past teaching manuals and curriculum guides. This particular tale begins at the turn of the 20th century--a time when the elementary school was firmly established in the country, and…

Writing groups have been used in a variety of academic disciplines to support and encourage faculty in their scholarly endeavors. This article gives an overview of the impact a writing group within a Teacher Education department at a teaching institution had on scholarly output over a two year period. The structure of the writing group is shared…

What lasting impact could a required general education writing course have on students' well-being? The authors examined this question in the context of the California State University- Chico Town Hall Meeting, a campus event sponsored jointly by the Academic Writing Program and the First-Year Experience Program from 2006 to 2009. In the Town…

While it is true that text is moving from the page to the screen, that does not mean the end or even marginalization of traditional reading and writing. If anything, it means more. And students leaving high school and entering university do not have, for the most part, the necessary skills to make themselves consistently understood in writing.…

Although it is a well-known fact that students' preferred learning styles vary, many instructors teach in the way that reflects their own learning style preferences despite the fact that mismatches in teacher-learner styles may result in lower student achievement. In a traditional ESL or EAP writing class, students who prefer to learn by reading…

Both writing and math require purposeful teaching. This article describes how one teacher discovered that she could teach math in a way that paralleled how she taught writing by researching what students know and then nudging them ahead to the next level of understanding. Just as effective writers employ creativity, perseverance, and revising,…

This article chronicles how the process of reviewing and grading student written work became an integral part of a middle school teacher's writing workshop practice. In addition to discussing how reading student work can bring educators back to the heart of the profession (including the belief that spending time with drafts can reap more rewards…