In this teaching tip, we--a literacy professor and two K-12 teachers--encourage a rethinking of the baseline writing assessment by sharing our experiences with "The Paper Selfie," an activity that juxtaposes the arts and young people's personal writing. By centering students' identities, their hopes, beliefs, dreams, and realities,…

Which components of grammar teaching--accuracy, meaningfulness, and appropriateness--are you the least comfortable including in your classroom activities? This Reflective Question and many others await your discussion and analysis in this revised edition of TESOL Press's best-selling "Teaching Grammar," which explores different…

Writing is the highest form of thinking, as evidenced by neuroimaging that shows how more neural networks are activated simultaneously during writing than during any other cognitive activity. This book will help teachers understand how the brain learns to write by unveiling 15 stages of thinking that underpin the writing process, along with…

At the Center for Integrated Access Networks (CIAN), an Engineering Research Center funded from 2008-2018 by the National Science Foundation, the education department worked to develop new and innovative digital resources to engage students in learning science content. One resource created, the CIAN Comic Book, focuses on educating students about…

Social work educators teach cultural competency and guide students to understand and address racism. Using mixed methods, we explored the influence of a one-semester course on racial attitudes, skills, and knowledge among 10 diverse undergraduate students. The "Seeing White" podcast delivered content about historic and systemic…

Almost twenty years ago, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) published "Principles and Standards for School Mathematics" (2000), which recommended that teachers should incorporate more writing into their math lessons, claiming that writing helps students "consolidate their thinking" (p. 402) by causing them…

Discover an innovative, evidence-based method for preparing students for the demands of college writing called Supporting Strategic Writers (SSW). The goal of SSW is to help students become independent learners who understand the value of strategies and can apply them flexibly in future courses and the workplace. The text provides genre-based…

How do teachers identify the potential for greater depth writing and encourage children to meet their full potential? This book was created by people who are not only passionate about primary education, but who are also leading experts in their own particular areas. They have made use of their wide experience to offer practical guidance on greater…

In this article Karen Adams demonstrates how to incorporate group grammar techniques into a classroom activity. In the activity, students practice using the target grammar to do something they naturally enjoy: learning about each other.

In writing instruction, teachers often struggle with developing engaging and interactive activities given constraints such as large classes and packed teaching schedules. A purposeful and appealing pre-task can energize the writing process and set the context for the subsequent writing task. With this purpose in mind, the author designed the…

Writing about mathematics holds a wealth of benefits for students. When students are given opportunities to write in math class, it helps develop mathematical thinking and language, encourages self-reflection, and provides a better way to organize ideas. Many teachers incorporate journaling and other types of reflective writing into their…

Writing from sources is an important academic skill but students find it a difficult skill to learn. The lesson study method was used to design and evaluate learning and teaching strategies aimed at improving students' writing from sources skills. The team developed a seven-part lesson plan and associated learning activities and practice…

In this article, the author discusses a graphic narrative or comic book writing assignment in greater detail to demonstrate the pedagogical benefits of teaching comics in the writing classroom. She argues that by assigning students a comic book project, writing instructors can promote competence in academic discourse by helping students learn and…

As an instructional framework, Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can guide science teachers to purposefully apply evidence-based instructional practices to increase engagement and learning of students with disabilities (Israel, Ribuffo, and Smith 2014; Marino et al. 2014; Ok et al. 2016). This article describes how to use the Universal Design…

Students with disabilities often find expressive writing frustrating and difficult. The prospect of writing a well-developed five-paragraph essay can be especially daunting. One reason is that struggling writers may have difficulty conceptualizing how the elements of an effective essay are developed. This article describes an instructional…