English Journal - Volume 103, Issue 3, 2014

Members of the Secondary Section Steering Committee comment on topics of importance to English language arts educators.

The article examines Yann Martel’s novel, Life of Pi, in the context of providing instruction across the high school curriculum.

The authors report outcomes of a collaborative, interdisciplinary effort through a study group developed to make connections across content areas (English and history/social studies) and grade levels (middle school, high school, and college).

This article illustrates the importance of taking the time to practice authentic collaboration for teachers to better their craft and help their students become independent and critical learners.

An eighth-grade English teacher and a math teacher work together to improve student writing, engagement, and communication in English and geometry classes.

This piece discusses how to use the young adult novel The Hunger Games to plan literacy-based lessons that draw on a variety of core content (English, history, math, and science) and deepen students’ understandings of curricular content across the school day.

Two teachers of different subject areas (English and mathematics) describe their experiences with a multidisciplinary research paper for senior high school students.

Teachers and students from diverse high schools, in collaboration with university personnel, came together for the Living Book Project and collectively reflected on Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.

The article describes a collaborative project co-taught by a creative writing teacher and the theater department’s technical director that required students to write an original script and perform it as toy theater or shadow theater.

This article offers suggestions on teaching a nonfiction unit (in English) and genetics unit (in biology) that, together, incorporate reading, researching, writing, and advocating for an environmental issue.

An English teacher and a math teacher collaborating to improve practices in classroom discussion develop a problem-solving method that steers students away from seeking simple solutions and into an understanding of the complexity and nature of problems.

This article reports on an ethnographic analysis of students who play chess at a mixed comprehensive school in England. The authors explore how children learn when playing chess and speculate about how the appeal of the game could be used by secondary teachers to improve English lessons.

“Continuous Becoming: Moving toward Mastery” offers suggestions, ideas, and experiences to help novice and veteran teachers discover their own roadmaps toward mastery.

This column seeks to explore the experiences of National Writing Project teachers as writers, teachers of writing, and educational leaders.

“Speaking Truth to Power” seeks to explore the experiences and possibilities that arise when educators speak truth to power.