Language Arts - Standards in Language Arts Education, Jan 1996

Has NCTE been led down the standards yellow brick road? Pat Shannon thinks so.

Michigan has been conducting a statewide effort to create standards that approach language arts education in an integrated fashion and that are useful for teachers and students. This first of three articles on the project discusses the overall framework of the standards and the mechanisms and strategies used to try to make the standards work.

The standards developed in the Michigan project come to life as teachers appropriate them into their daily classroom instruction.

Stories from standards demonstration sites — places teachers come together to study standards and to grow in their teaching — provide yet another perspective on the Michigan project and the overall issue of language arts standards.

The children in this middle school classroom and their families celebrated their diversity by investigating their heritage and immigration to the United States. Out of this study of diversity emerged considerable learning and a strong sense of community