The Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) incorporates challenging literacy standards into middle grades and high school content areas within a variety of academic disciplines, not just English/language arts courses. The Mathematics Design Collaborative (MDC) provides schools with instructional tools needed to help teachers understand and implement…

Reading before class has been demonstrated to improve student learning. This article describes the installation and effectiveness of a strategy to encourage student class preparation. The strategy, called the Class-to-Class Method, has been implemented in a large private university in Chile. The university hopes that this innovation will reduce…

This article presents an overview of a newly designed course in materials development at a teacher education institute in the Netherlands. It also includes an evaluation of the course by its participants, student teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Dutch secondary schools. The course overview describes the aims and objectives of the…

This article argues that the instructional scaffolding metaphor may be reconceived as distributed scaffolding when multiple means of influence are provided in a service-learning setting. In the service-learning course described here, the professor's role is largely as designer of activity settings for preservice teacher candidates, through…

Just-in-Time Teaching (JiTT) methodology uses Web-based tools to gather student responses to questions on preclass reading assignments. However, the technological requirements of JiTT and the content-specific nature of the questions may prevent some instructors from implementing it. Our own JiTT implementation uses publicly and freely available…

"Teaching English by Design" is two books in one: a primer for teaching secondary English and a comprehensive guide to creating and using four to six-week instructional units. Peter Smagorinsky shares important insight about students, how they learn, and what kinds of classrooms support their achievement in reading and writing. Then he uses those…

For one instructor of eleventh and twelfth grade English, teaching the short story offers the best opportunity to teach fiction writing to students. It contains all the elements novels contain, but students can read many short stories in the same time they need to read a novel. Students can also write their own short stories. Above all, literature…

Advocates the use of novels in art education to offer students insights into ways an artist sees the world and approaches an artistic task. Specifically discusses Colby Rodowsky's "Julie's Daughter," Zibby Oneal's "In Summer Light," and Elizabeth de Trevino's "I, Juan de Pareja" as young adult novels that focus on artistic endeavor. (GEA)

A discussion of the challenge and promise of honors courses precedes an examination of an American History honors class composed of 24 high school juniors and seniors selected by one or more sets of criteria. The students came from well educated parents who raised comparatively small families, 13 were either first born or only children, and all…

Drawing on methods currently employed at St. Philip's College (San Antonio, Texas), this paper describes six strategies for teaching critical reading skills to developmental students. For each of the methods presented, relevant resources are cited, a step-by-step instructional approach is provided, and the purpose and goals of the specific…