The digital is inextricably woven across people's everyday lives and literacy practices, and English educators are tasked with preparing students to be critical, ethical, and agentic inventors and consumers of digital text. What has crystallized for English educators is an awareness that facilitating "digital discourse"--or the multiple…

A movement is taking place in school districts and classrooms as teachers are embracing engaged learning environments in which they are listening to the often-silenced voices of their students. This article chronicles moments from the journeys of four learners who represent a range of experiences and perspectives on re-envisioning the work done in…

The most common forms of teacher professional development are ineffective and lead to low teacher satisfaction. A critique protocol offers an alternative that intellectually engages teachers and fosters meaningful collaboration at different career stages. This paper discusses the work that should be done before beginning any critique session, as…

Collaboration often does not happen in team projects, is absent in faculty meetings, happens sporadically in staff lounges or in hallways, and is infrequent during professional development. This is because collaboration is the act of coconstructing knowledge, coming together with a clear understanding of how and why people are working together.…

Using Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow, the authors trace the history and development of their co-teaching relationship and describe how the co-teachers and students experienced flow. In co-opting theoretical views of flow, used in other fields such as organizational science/psychology, the school setting can be viewed as an…

According to the authors, Horizon Writing Project (HWP), is a collaborative research project that emerged from a mentorship program implemented for language arts teachers in southern Alberta, Canada. Seven English teachers participated in the project: Rita, Sean, Jaimie, Taylor, and Kacie, who teach senior high, and Keith and Lindsey, who teach…

In this article, the authors challenge myths about honors classes in an effort to deliver "effective instruction" to all students, notably students in need of special education services, in a co-taught English class.

An English teacher and a math teacher collaborating to improve practices in classroom discussion develop a problem-solving method that steers students away from seeking simple solutions and into an understanding of the complexity and nature of problems.

This article argues for the importance of teaching research as a creative practice. The authors recommend geography and conversation as generative metaphors for teaching and learning creative research methods, offering examples from their undergraduate composition courses. Creating knowledge as a researcher requires posing the question to be…

A mentoring relationship that began as part of teacher preparation can evolve into a professional community that stays connected through several means of communication. While there are examples of mentoring relationships within schools and among former university cohorts, these authors took a slightly different approach. Rather than forming a…

Rachel Malchow Lloyd describes the wonderful and quite natural potential for a team of teachers, through their professional conversations and routine planning, to model for less experienced teachers how to prepare for instruction, how to assess its effect, and how to assume a professional stance consistently in the daily execution of…

When new scholars join an organization as large as the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), the size of its Conventions can be daunting. This author was fortunate because NCTE members embraced her and helped her find her way in the field after a first presentation in 2001. After the presentation, she was invited to meet with a few of…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) urge English language arts teachers to assume responsibility for teaching technical reading, along with literature, poetry, and composition. Ideally, each teacher assumes a share in developing reading proficiency within his or her content area, but state assessments may implicitly compel school districts to…

As districts continue to implement the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), English language arts (ELA) teachers and content-area teachers may find themselves collaborating in surprising and welcome new ways. The CCSS's emphasis on reading and writing across all content areas provides an opportunity for ELA teachers to emerge as literacy experts in…

The authors report outcomes of a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort through a study group developed to make connections across content areas (English and history/social studies) and grade levels (middle school, high school, and college).