Purpose: This study aims to explore three methods of soliciting student-to-teacher feedback in a tenth-grade English classroom. Design/methodology/approach: The foundational inquiry asks what type of instructions -- sentence stems, open-response or directed-response -- yields the most honest and actionable responses when soliciting feedback. The…

Purpose: Early career teachers (ECTs) of Color are key in making change, resisting racism and pushing back against white supremacy in K-12 education, specifically in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms. Through a narrative telling inquiry (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000) of Nora, an Asian American ELA ECT in the Midwest, and by drawing on…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore teachers' shifts in pedagogy and practice as they implemented a project-based learning (PBL) approach to teaching English Language Arts (ELA) for the first time. Design/methodology/approach: The authors interviewed 10 ninth-grade ELA teachers in three schools after their first year enacting PBL. Initial codes…

Purpose: By engaging levels of W/writerliness, this paper aims to identify how English Language Arts teachers' personal and professional W/writerly identities impact their performance of pedagogical agency. Design/methodology/approach: In this narrative inquiry, the author draws on theories of writing identity and agency to analyze how four…

Purpose: This study aims to explore the authentic questioning practices of English Language Arts teachers. Although language arts (LA) education emphasizes the value of authentic questions in discussions about literature, teachers still tend to ask known-answer questions that guide students toward one literary interpretation. However, outside…

Purpose: This paper aims to highlight a reconstructive lens on one white teacher's critical approach to teaching literacy. This work equally highlights the importance of anti-racist approach to critical pedagogies centered on a humanizing ethic of cariño. Design/methodology/approach: Drawing on portraiture and qualitative methods, this paper uses…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how evangelical teachers' religious identities influence their interpretation and teaching of texts in high school English Language Arts classrooms. Further, this paper examines how evangelical teachers make choices about how to balance the demands of their religious and teacher identities as they interact with…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the extent to which students' experiences and perceptions of their literature classroom align with their teacher's instructional goals for literary inquiry and what teachers can learn from gaining access to students' perspectives on their classroom experiences. Design/methodology/approach: Thematic analyses were…

Purpose: This paper aims to examine how two White teachers, experienced and award-winning veteran educators, navigated issues of race, class and privilege in their instruction, and ways that their efforts and shortcomings shaped both teacher agency and classroom spaces. Design/methodology/approach: This study's methodology centers participants'…

Purpose: This paper aims to present findings from a three-year qualitative study that used a model of teacher learning referred to as teaching as inquiry (Manfra, 2019). Teaching as inquiry centers the teacher as a learner in a prolonged and "systematic process of data collection and analysis focused on changing teaching" (p. 167).…

Purpose: This study centers on high school pre-teacher education students' reviews of their peers' digital stories. The purpose of this study is twofold: to bring digital storytelling to the forefront as a literacy practice within classrooms that seeks to privilege students' voices and experiences and also to encapsulate the authors' different…

Purpose: This study aims to explore and provide empirical evidence for ways that teachers can simultaneously support students' literary reading and analytic writing through dialogic assessment, an approach to conferencing with writers that foregrounds process and integrates assessment and instruction. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses…

Purpose: This paper aims to report on a study investigating how young people and teachers interpreted reading proficiency and difficulty across different tracks of English language arts in the sole high school serving a culturally diverse city. Design/methodology/approach: For six months, the researchers observed in three hierarchically tracked…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to support the integration of scientifically grounded linguistic knowledge into language teaching in English Language Arts (ELA) classrooms through building an understanding of what teachers currently know and believe about language. Design/methodology/approach: In total, 310 high school English teachers in…

Purpose: Grounded in the scholarship addressing teacher self-censorship around controversial topics, this paper aims to investigate a three-part research question: How do secondary English language arts (ELA) teacher--candidates (TCs) in the penultimate semester of their undergraduate teacher education program position political texts/speeches,…