Offering advice from a host of experts in adolescent literacy, this book helps answer real questions from parents across the country about how to best support their teens as readers and writers.

The authors describe their struggles and eventual success with students in constructing a "counternarrative to colormuteness and colorblindness"—the self-imposed student segregation and silencing of voice.

By designing lessons to activate prior knowledge and linking these activities to reading and writing, teachers found that students were more engaged, that they learned more material more quickly, and that they more willingly incorporated reading into their lives.

As part of the NCTE High School Literature Series, Tim O'Brien in the Classroom focuses on opportunities for classroom discussion and writing assignments, including lessons, open-ended prompts, and student writing samples.

This article reports on the meaning potential of daily access to drawing/writing media for widening and deepening meaning construction.

This article discusses the imaginative activities and assignments that teachers often assign that violate the text around which the lesson is focused and that mislead students about its meaning.

An annotated bibliography of books that exemplify the plot elements, character, setting, and theme. Includes guidelines on how to do a book talk.

This book isn't about technology. It's about the teaching practices that technology enables. This book addresses the ways in which teachers and students work together to navigate continuous change and what it means to read, write, view, listen, and communicate in the twenty-first century.

Colleen A. Ruggieri offers a multigenre, mulltiple intelligences unit on transcendentalism complete with suggested texts and an assessment plan.

Research comes alive when students explore a range of alternate genres instead of writing the traditional research report.

Describes a research paper in the author's high school English classroom which connected to the lives and interests of students, who delved into community problems with as much rigor (and using many types of research as traditional essays exploring arcane philosophical questions). Describes creating a context for exploration, and students' final projects.

This science inquiry in a fourth-grade classroom affirms the importance of observation, questioning, reading, and writing to the inquiry process.

Kenneth Lindblom and Patricia A. Dunn teach language awareness and use through published complaints about the teaching of grammar. Students are able to recognize issues of race and class that determine acceptable usage and learn the importance of audience in their own language use.

Suggests the authentic audience found on the Internet has a profound effect on the quality of student writing in all grades, and that the key to successful technology projects is integrating them into the curriculum so that computers are a means, not an end. Offers ideas for classroom activities and projects using stand-alone computers, and using computers with Internet access.

Argues that regular homophone practice enhances vocabulary knowledge, spelling skills, pronunciation ability, and overall reading proficiency. Describes how card games played with decks of homophones helped to accomplish these things. Notes particular benefits of homophone games to ESL students, and outlines key advantages of using the games.

Veteran educator Howard Miller shares a set of strategies that can propel middle school writers (and "inventive" spellers) into the role of being responsible and strategic in this Voices from the Middle article.

Describes how an English teacher uses ghost stories in his classroom to further students' interest in and understanding of epics. Presents a short unit in which all the class work focuses on scary kinds of things.

This article shows how to affirm and draw on the dialect diversity of students to foster the learning of Standard English.

Using texts that first meet the reading "levels" of middle school students, then offering increasingly challenging books, teachers can group students at all levels using multiple texts. Strategy logs and conferences are two of the successful tools teachers use to increase comprehension as well as critical reading skills.

Using children's picture books, Deborah Dean provided frameworks for student research papers that avoided the pitfalls leading to voiceless and encyclopedic writing. Research guide sheets; class analysis of text organization, sentence variety, stylistic choices; and peer review all contribute to interesting final papers.