English Journal - Volume 104, Issue 6, 2015

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

Two teachers synthesize the findings of research published in RTE between 2009 and 2012 to support the professional development of preservice and inservice English educators. The authors share research findings that could inform middle school and high school English teachers’ pedagogy and practice.

This piece explores conditions that stimulate classroom activities to facilitate creative habits of mind in an effort to motivate educators and students to better understand the complexities of creativity and how to promote it.

This article explores dialogical forms of pedagogy, in the form of a dialogue between two secondary English teachers.

Essential Questions provide frameworks for collaborative team curriculum creation; yet, controversy around such questions arises because of several factors. This author suggests five paths to responsible, English-friendly use of Essential Questions.

The article argues that teachers can help students learn to read figurative language by using instruction and activities for visual literacy as a means to enhancing the reading of poetic language.

These teachers use the seminal painting Guernica to engage students in a transferable process focused on three key principles: negotiate (read), decipher (mean), and produce (create). This article promotes active construction of meaning through calculated risk-taking.

This piece cites numerous examples of teachers reflecting over a two-year period on their teaching practice to explore the applicability of Joseph Harris’s meta-language for revision, to the supervision of beginning teachers and the nurturing of reflective practice in experienced teachers.

The author shares a classroom unit that facilitates exploration of culturally based values, value clashes, and value shifts with experience, age, and circumstance. The unit leads students to make choices upholding what’s most important to them and provides tools for successful cross-cultural communication.

This column explores how paying attention to disability–both to the rich contributions made by people with disabilities and to the sometimes negative attitudes in society that can interfere with those contributions–can foster classroom interactions that are more democratic, more inclusive, and more equitable.

“Soft(a)ware in the English Classroom” seeks to identify the ways in which our teaching and learning lives are influenced by software.

This column serves as a space dedicated to conversation about Young Adult Literature and to celebrate adolescents, their reading, and their experiences by reviewing the texts that engage them.

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

“Lingua Anglia: Bridging Language and Learners” discusses critical, transformative, and powerful ways to support students’ acquisition of Standard English.