This article describes how one such teacher, Shirley Thacker, developed and implemented a successful writing program in her first grade classroom, which is known as Thackerville. Shirley describes how she motivated a classroom of first-graders to use the writing process in a workshop format and how this approach affected the children's perceptions…

This paper reflects on and theorises the experience of developing a postgraduate core subject in EAP, exploring the role of both genre awareness and process management in facilitating writing from sources. Reflection on our initial genre-based pedagogies indicated that teaching the literature review to coursework students was not appropriate, and…

The present study investigated University of Swaziland Bachelor of Education degree (B.Ed) (Primary and secondary) students' conception of the current trends in writing instruction. The extent of their conception of these trends was examined on only four selected writing ideas namely collaborative writing, the process approach to writing, teacher…

In the present study, participants were 127 3rd-grade students, to 64 of whom (33 boys, 31 girls) the authors taught a general strategy and a genre-specific strategy for planning and writing stories; procedures for regulating the use of these strategies, the writing process, and their writing behaviors; and knowledge about the basic purpose and…

The evolution of a writing project in a language arts methods course provided the author, a teacher educator, an opportunity to reformat a writing assignment so that students would be encouraged to write for an authentic audience. The author reflects on a series of changes made to a writing project assigned as part of a language arts methods…

Student-written cases are powerful pedagogical tools that can lead to improved understanding of business situations, more informed analysis, emphasis on reflection, and clearer expository writing, all of which are critical skills for business students. Cases provide an opportunity for students to enjoy an active learning experience and derive the…

Teaching is emotional, especially when teachers must change their practices. Past research on emotions and change in the general population has been predominately quantitative. Research about teachers' emotions, however, has been predominately qualitative. To draw on both these approaches, this mixed methods study examined 50 elementary teachers'…

This is Part 1 of a three part series of articles summarizing selected articles from the journals of the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) over a period of thirty-five years from 1972 to 2007. Part 1 traces the evolution of the library media specialist to emphasize a greater student-centered approach to teaching and learning.…

Protocol analyses in research on writing reveal that throughout the composing process talented writers direct a tremendous amount of mental effort toward integrating and pursuing complex goals such as developing and following overriding themes, elaborating main points, clarifying content for a particular audience, and integrating genre features.…

The author cuts through the pressurized, strategy-overloaded, fluency-crazed atmosphere surrounding reading instruction to lay out the reading and writing workshop practices that are most effective in developing readers in the primary grades. She shares the daily how-tos needed to sustain a literacy block that engages children in authentic reading…

For an inquiry-based alternative to lectures and recall tests, I encouraged learners to become "geotourists"; that is, learners researched and developed a geologic guidebook to a United States National Park of their choice. Over the course of a semester, students wrote chapters on plate tectonics, the rock cycle, geologic history,…

In response to a thirty-year pattern of elevated high school dropout rates and a multi-generational disengagement from traditional school-based literacy practices among urban community members, the project on which this article reports asked a group of city students to document photographically what they perceived as the purposes of, impediments…

While interactive writing has typically been utilized and researched in the primary grades, little has been written about its use with older students. The author briefly describes the historic use of interactive writing, along with appropriate research, then goes on to describe its use in her third-grade classroom as a tool to teach writer's craft…

Many intensive English language programmes that English second language (ESL) students enrol in adopt a process approach to writing, interpreting writing as a cognitive process that is highly private or individualistic (Atkinson, 2003), where writers use specific cognitive phases, such as pre-writing, drafting, and revising, to generate their…

Every so often, a technology will saturate the market to the extent that the name of the product becomes a stand-in for the technology itself. While it belongs to the broader genre of slideware, Microsoft PowerPoint is perhaps the best example of software that has achieved that level of ubiquity. Despite Apple's Keynote, the Presentation Editor…