A middle school language arts teacher reflects on his experience in utilizing a school-housed online social network to create avenues for authentic audience, purpose, and response to student writing. With many technology proponents advocating a 21st century education, the fact that interacting with the Web 2.0 environment is essentially a reading…

At the minimum, one of every four middle school students will struggle to cope with the grade-level textbooks they are typically assigned to read. Few reading programs used in middle schools have any research evidence that they actually improve student reading proficiencies. Only three programs had even modest evidence of a positive effect, and…

Considers how the frustration of reading student work that continued to contain errors on common words, especially homonyms, led to the development of the Spelling Unforgivables initiative at a middle school. Notes that for such an initiative to work, it takes time, consistency, and a concerted effort by all teachers. (SG)

Identifies a number of growth paths from 15 years of experimenting with Literature Circles. Presents an annotated bibliography of seven collections of very short fiction the author has been using to create collaboration minilessons. Notes that microfictions work on every level, are packed with craft, and often feature a surprising synthesis or…

Considers how the "Readers Are Survivors" program encourages students to become lifelong readers, and focuses on the value of providing families with a way to actually communicate about something other than homework, chores, and curfews. Presents a description of what has evolved over the past three years in this program. Suggests that…

A literacy support teacher leads a district-wide initiative to organize content-area teachers in an effort to help their students become better readers by offering instruction and practice in five reading strategies across the curriculum. At the end of the 10-week program, teachers felt that students' comprehension had improved, and many felt some…

When the authors realized that successful book selection is not a natural skill for all learners, they developed a tool to support self-selection of independent reading material without book leveling. This tool is called BOOKMATCH, and it supports readers for whom book selection is "complicated." BOOKMATCH is an acronym in which each letter…