Principles in Practice Series

As a high school teacher, Ricki Ginsberg realized that a truly student-centered classroom requires student input. To foster a more ethical, community-based approach to curriculum design and instruction, she worked with her students to reimagine and co-design existing, grade-level courses, and in doing so, they integrated young adult literature as central to the curriculum and course design. In this book, Ginsberg, along with more than a dozen teacher contributors, shares course design possibilities for teachers seeking to disrupt and reimagine traditional structures with the inclusion of YA literature. With communities of practice as a guiding framework, Challenging Traditional Classroom Spaces with YA Literature explores how teachers might work with students to build a community that defines their purposes together, how they might investigate new possibilities for existing or traditional courses by harnessing the potential of YA literature, how they might use critical freedom to co-develop YA electives, and how they can lead literate lives together as a community of practice that is engaged with their local and global communities. Grounded in NCTE’s Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature position statement, this book offers both big ideas, such as overarching structural decisions and pedagogical positioning, as well as a wealth of flexible and adaptable practical strategies and ideas that can be implemented directly in secondary classrooms with varied contexts and purposes.

In Growing Writers, veteran teacher educator Anne Elrod Whitney explores how the principles defined in NCTE’s Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing position statement can support high school writers and teachers of writing through knowledge and a conscious search for meaning in our writing activities.  When principles guide our teaching, we can better understand our teaching purposes, make decisions about approaches and content, vet ideas supplied by others, and grow as teachers of writing. As part of the Writing in Today’s Classrooms strand of the Principles in Practice imprint, the book includes snapshots from high school teachers working in a variety of settings who illustrate how their own principled classroom practices have helped both them and their students to grow, whether they are writing for advocacy, learning the importance of revision, experimenting with new audiences, or embracing the vulnerability and the power of writing.  The principles come alive through the author’s analysis and friendly discussion and the contributing teachers’ everyday practices. Whitney’s compassionate support and encouragement of active, ongoing learning is supplemented by further-reading lists and an annotated bibliography of both print and digital texts to accompany us on our journeys to ever-greater effectiveness as writers and teachers of writing.

Even from the earliest grades, children have the rights to read and write—not just in dominant American English, but also in their own languages and dialects. Young children make meaning and make sense from the earliest years. They read facial expressions, engage in interactions, and read symbols across a variety of named languages. Historically narrow definitions of reading and writing, however, often prevent children of color and immigrants from having access to texts that reflect their diverse cultures and backgrounds. Classroom materials also often don't reflect the growing majority of multilingual children of color, compromising their right to access texts that reflect their cultural values, language practices, and historical legacies. Promoting equitable, inclusive, and plural understandings of literacy, Mariana Souto-Manning and eight New York City public school teachers explore how elementary teachers can welcome into their classrooms the voices, values, language practices, stories, and experiences of their students who have been minoritized by dominant curricula, cultivating reading and writing experiences that showcase children's varied skills and rich practices. Readers are invited to enter classrooms where teachers have engaged with the principles detailed in two NCTE position statements--NCTE Beliefs about the Students' Right to Write and The Students' Right to Read--in the pursuit of justice. Collectively, their experiences show that when teachers view the communities their students come from as assets to and in school, children not only thrive academically, but they also gain confidence in themselves as learners and develop a critical consciousness. Together, stepping into their power, they seek to right historical and contemporary wrongs as they commit to changing the world. About Principles in Practice Books in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements. Each book discusses the research on a specific topic, links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement, and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical, teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.

Already Readers and Writers: Honoring Students' Rights to Read and Write in the Middle Grade Classroom is meant to help all middle school educators encourage their students to build literate lives both within the classroom and well beyond it. Veteran middle school teacher Jennifer Ochoa has brought together middle school teachers and teacher leaders, children’s author and We Need Diverse Books cofounder Ellen Oh, children’s literature scholar Kristin McIlhagga, reading and writing workshop teacher-author Linda Rief, and censorship expert Millie Davis to examine current middle school literacy practices that support students’ rights to read and write. By showcasing their experiences and activities, and positioning NCTE policy statements—The Students' Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write—as foundational guiding documents, Ochoa and her colleagues prove that even in today’s standards-driven environment, authentic reading and writing practices can create literacy-rich middle school classrooms. As a bonus, teachers who don’t have strong support in their schools to implement these practices will find a myriad of suggestions for developing a virtual personal learning network—a grassroots professional development tailored to their needs and interests—that will support them in their efforts to help kids as readers and writers. About Principles in Practice Books in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements. Each book discusses the research on a specific topic, links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement, and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical, teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.

A reflective and practical guide for secondary school teachers on using innovative technologies in the classroom to support multimodal literacy development. Living in a multimodal, multimedia, and multi-sensory world can be overwhelming. To prepare students to produce and consume the multimodal texts made possible through modern technologies, Schmidt and Kruger-Ross advocate for a slower and more deliberate approach to thinking and planning for teaching literacies. They showcase how technologies can expand, enhance, and inspire the consuming and producing powers of secondary students by examining visual and aural literacies before multimodal literacies.  Embedded throughout the book are the voices and materials of real practicing and preservice teachers, via QR codes. Teachers of all experience levels will find new ideas to challenge, extend, and enhance their literacy practice.

The authors share classroom vignettes, strategies, and resources for “going public” with literacy assessment through teacher collaboration with colleagues, with families, and with the community. Teachers want assessment tools and strategies that inform instruction, engage students in the process, and invite families and community members to enter into the conversation about student learning and progress. When teachers work collaboratively with one another, they align beliefs and practices to generate new ideas that reflect the questions they are asking about literacy and learning. When students, families, and the community are invited to be active, engaged participants in these discussions, all stakeholders have an opportunity to create a shared vision for literacy learning and to construct assessment tools and strategies that help everyone answer the important questions: “How as teachers are we engaging with one another over our literacy assessment beliefs and practices?” and “How can we better bring families and communities into these conversations?”  In this volume of the Principles in Practice Literacy Assessment strand of books, veteran educators Kathryn Mitchell Pierce and Rosario Ordoñez-Jasis share classroom vignettes, strategies, and resources for “going public” with literacy assessment through teacher collaboration with colleagues, with families, and with the community. Drawing from the IRA–NCTE Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing, Revised Edition, and their own extensive experience, the authors have compiled a set of collaborative assessment principles, as well as a model for teacher professional development around assessment, to guide teachers from assessment theory to practical implementation in the classroom.  Teachers are at the heart of assessment conversations because they have up-close and personal experiences with how assessments impact their students. These experiences provide an invaluable perspective that is essential to all decision making about assessing student learning. But teachers don’t—or shouldn’t—stand alone. Their critical expertise is strengthened by the experiences and expertise of others invested in the success of our students—colleagues, families, communities, and students themselves.

Writing Can Change Everything invites all of us to consider how the principles outlined in NCTE’s Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing position statement weave throughout the best practices on display as students write through creative self-expression, narrative, inquiry, and project-based learning.  Identifying writing as central to what makes us human, editor and teacher educator Shelbie Witte has gathered a diverse group of middle school teacher-writers who open the doors of their classrooms to share their approaches to mentoring, modeling, and facilitating middle level writers as they explore their places within our world.  Early adolescents might be physically and emotionally in flux, but they are also multidimensional, multitalented creatures of curiosity, always pushing the boundaries of discovery and possibility. The seven educators whose classrooms are showcased in this book know that being a writer is being part of the world, and they lead their students toward the understanding that writing makes a difference, both in their own lives and in the broader world.  About Principles in Practice Books in the Principles in Practice imprint offer teachers concrete illustrations of effective classroom practices based in NCTE research briefs and policy statements. Each book discusses the research on a specific topic, links the research to an NCTE brief or policy statement, and then demonstrates how those principles come alive in practice: by showcasing actual classroom practices that demonstrate the policies in action; by talking about research in practical, teacher-friendly language; and by offering teachers possibilities for rethinking their own practices in light of the ideas presented in the books.

Engaging with critical questions such as What counts as language? and How can I know when a student is struggling with language?, Melinda J. McBee Orzulak explores how mainstream ELA teachers might begin to understand language in new ways to benefit both English language learner and non-ELL students learning in the same classroom. Offering supportive teaching resources and ways to notice and understand the strengths of ELL students, McBee Orzulak outlines strategies for respectful and rigorous instruction for all students as we consider our own cultural and linguistic expectations. She also addresses responses to common curricular challenges such as:  Structuring positive environments for students as both learners and adolescents Providing a language focus in our teaching Assessing the range of literacies our ELL students possessTo meet the needs of in-service and preservice teachers, unique features of the book include Key Understandings and Getting Started questions with each chapter, key practices linked to classroom vignettes, sample assignments, and lists of next steps and resources. Understanding Language provides a series of entry points into the NCTE Position Paper on the Role of English Teachers in Educating English Language Learners (ELLs), focusing in particular on knowing and teaching all of our students—monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual—both language and content.

At the heart of Rethinking the “Adolescent” in Adolescent Literacy is a call to English language arts teachers to examine the very assumptions of adolescence they may be operating from in order to reimagine new possibilities for engaging students with the English curriculum.  Relying on a sociocultural view of adolescence established by scholars in critical youth studies, the book focuses on classrooms from diverse contexts to explain adolescence as a construct and how this perspective of youth can encourage educators to re-envision literacy instruction and learning. Working from and looking beyond Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, the authors explore the “myth” of adolescence and the possibility of a curriculum that positions youth as experts and knowledgeable advocates fully engaged in their own learning.

Grounded in NCTE’s position statements “The Students’ Right to Read” and “NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write,” this book focuses on high school English language arts classes, drawing from the work of seven teachers from across the country to illustrate how advocating for students’ rights to read and write can be revolutionary work. Drawing from the work of high school teachers across the country, Adventurous Thinking illustrates how advocating for students’ rights to read and write can be revolutionary work. Ours is a conflicted time: the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements, for instance, run parallel with increasingly hostile attitudes toward immigrants and prescriptive K–12 curricula, including calls to censor texts. Teachers who fight to give their students the tools and opportunities to read about and write on topics of their choice and express ideas that may be controversial are, in editor Mollie V. Blackburn’s words, “revolutionary artists, and their teaching is revolutionary art.” The teacher chapters focus on high school English language arts classes that engaged with topics such as immigration, linguistic diversity, religious diversity, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, interrogating privilege, LGBTQ people, and people with physical disabilities and mental illness. Following these accounts is an interview with Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give, and an essay by Millie Davis, former director of NCTE’s Intellectual Freedom Center. The closing essay reflects on provocative curriculum and pedagogy, criticality, community, and connections, as they get taken up in the book and might get taken up in the classrooms of readers. The book is grounded in foundational principles from NCTE’s position statements The Students’ Right to Read and NCTE Beliefs about the Students’ Right to Write that underlie these contributors’ practices, principles that add up to one committed declaration: Literacy is every student’s right.

Imagine being asked to write an essay in a language you don’t know well or at all, to have to express yourself—your knowledge and analysis—grammatically and clearly in, say, three to five pages. How is your Spanish, your Urdu, your Hmong?  This is what teachers ask their ELL and multilingual students to do every day in middle and high school, especially in English classes, leading to expectations both too great and too small. Teachers often resort to worksheets and grammar drills that don’t produce good writing or allow these students to tap in to their first language assets and strengths. Writing well is a primary door-opener to success in secondary school, college, and the workplace; it’s also the most difficult language skill to master. Add writing in a second language to the mix, and the task difficulty is magnified.  In Writing across Culture and Language, Christina Ortmeier-Hooper challenges deficit models of ELL and multilingual writers and offers techniques to help teachers identify their students’ strengths and develop inclusive research-based writing practices that are helpful to all students. Her approach, aligned with specific writing instruction recommendations outlined in the NCTE Position Paper on the Role of English Teachers in Educating English Language Learners (ELLs), connects theory to classroom application, with a focus on writing instruction, response, and assessment for ELL and multilingual students. Through rich examples of these writers and their writing practices, along with “best practices” input from classroom teachers, this book provides accessible explanations of second language writing theory and pedagogy in teacher-friendly language, concrete suggestions for the classroom, guiding questions to support discussion, and an annotated list of resources.

In the dialogical classroom, students use writing to explore who they are becoming and how they relate to the larger culture around them. Dialogical writing combines academic and personal writing; allows writers to bring multiple voices to the work; Involves thought, reflection, and engagement across time and space; and creates opportunities for substantive and ongoing meaning making. How can we, as teachers, carve out space in our literacy classrooms for a more dialogical approach to writing? Focusing on adolescent learners, Bob Fecho argues that teachers need to develop writing experiences that are reflective across time in order to foster even deeper explorations of subject matter, and he creates an ongoing conversation between classroom practice, theory, and research to show how each informs the others. Drawing on NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing, this book illustrates the empowerment that can result from dialogical writing even as it examines the complications of implementing this approach in the classroom. In this book, you will discover how to fashion a dialogical writing program that meets your and your students’ needs. Fecho helps you get there by providing a window into the classrooms of middle and high school teachers who are engaged in a dialogue with their practices. You’ll see how these teachers enact practice in different contexts, and you’ll hear them explain the essentials of their teaching as they demonstrate how dialogical classrooms depend on context and are forever in a state of becoming. The dialogical classroom: often messy, complex, thoughtful, and inspired, but most of all, full of potential.

Beyond Standardized Truth, included in the Principles in Practice imprint, is the result of the author’s own efforts to bridge the gap between valuing reading and being able to respond with appropriate instruction or evaluate growth in reading.  Scott Filkins brings us into his classroom and the classrooms of his colleagues to demonstrate how high school teachers across the disciplines can engage in inquiry-based reading assessment to support student learning. Based in the IRA–NCTE Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing, Revised Edition, the classroom portraits highlight the importance of incorporating genuinely formative assessment into our instruction.  Filkins unpacks his own history with assessment through engaging “confessions” of his early practices and eventual growth toward a framework that situates reading assessment in an inquiry model. Throughout the book, he showcases his colleagues’ attempts to use an inquiry framework, including the various tools and documentation methods that help them inquire into their students’ habits and thoughts as readers, use formative assessment to fuel the gradual release of responsibility framework, and use reading assessment as a means of professional reflection.  Finally, Filkins challenges us to broaden the conversation about assessment to a wider range of stakeholders and offers a vision of assessment as an expression of care for the students in our charge.

Through case studies of individual students and lively portraits of elementary classrooms, editor Diane Stephens and colleagues explore how artful preK–5 teachers come to know their students through assessment and use that knowledge to customize reading instruction.  Throughout the book, the educators profiled—classroom teachers, reading specialists, and literacy coaches—work together to take personal and professional responsibility for knowing their students and ensuring that every child becomes a successful reader. The teachers detail the assessment tools they use, how they make sense of the data they collect, and how they use that information to inform instruction.  Like the other books in the Literacy Assessment strand of NCTE’s Principles in Practice imprint, Reading Assessment is based on the IRA–NCTE Standards for the Assessment of Reading and Writing, Revised Edition, which outlines the elements of high-quality literacy assessment. These educators show us how putting those standards in action creates the conditions under which readers thrive.

This book is written for K–5 educators who are interested in cultivating young writers by designing and facilitating writing instruction that begins with the resources that students bring to the classrooms from their families, homes, and communities. This kind of asset-based and individualized instruction is designed to meet the unique writing needs of each young writer. K–5 educators teaching in shifting contexts encounter an array of challenges daily, from restrictive language policies and mandates to heightened accountability measures that often dictate the design of their writing time and instruction. This book focuses on elementary school teachers working with young writers in varying educational contexts, including dual language, bilingual, and English Only contexts, and in particular students who come from culturally and linguistically diverse settings. Part of the Principles in Practice series. Part of the Principles in Practice series, this book also includes a robust list of resources for writing teachers, as well as helpful insights for: Getting multilingual students writing beyond the classroom walls Designing a writing community that works for all your learners Using writing conferences as a social practice Inviting the use of all linguistic, cultural, and experiential resources  

Reading is interpreting; interpreting is reading, which is why it’s more crucial than ever to ensure that our students are able to make meaning as they read. But do we know how to integrate best practices in reading instruction into our classrooms? In Adolescent Literacy and the Teaching of Reading: Lessons for Teachers of Literature, Deborah Appleman dismantles the traditional divide between secondary teachers of literature and teachers of reading and offers a variety of practical ways to teach reading within the context of literature classrooms. As part of NCTE’s Principles in Practice imprint, the book draws on research-based understandings emerging from Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, woven together with practical lessons that will enrich the reading experiences of all students. Using real-world examples from diverse secondary classrooms, Appleman helps literature teachers find answers to the questions they have about teaching reading: How can I help students negotiate the complex texts that they will encounter both in and out of the classroom? What are the best ways to engage whole classes in a variety of texts, both literary and nonliterary? What does it mean to be a struggling reader and how can I support these students? How can I inspire and motivate the male readers in my classes?

The authors show how English teachers can think and plan using a restorative justice lens to address issues of student disconnection and alienation; adult and youth well-being in schools; and inequity and racial justice through writing, reading, speaking, and action. How do teachers educate responsibly in an age of mass incarceration? And why should English teachers in particular concern themselves with unequal treatment and opportunity and the school-to-prison pipeline? The authors—teacher educators and a restorative justice practitioner—address these and other critical questions, examining the intersection of restorative justice (RJ) and education with a focus on RJ processes that promote inclusivity and ownership. This book is a beginning guide for ELA teachers to address harm and inequities in the classroom, school, community, and nation. Viewing adolescent literacy, as outlined in Adolescent Literacy: An NCTE Policy Research Brief, through the lens of restorative justice will help teachers recognize just how integral practicing empathy and justice is to developing adolescent literacy. The authors provide concrete, specific examples of how ELA teachers can think and plan curriculum using an RJ lens to address issues of student disconnection and alienation, adult and youth well-being in schools, and inequity and racial justice through writing, reading, speaking, and action.

Building upon the 2018 Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature position statement, Restorying Young Adult Literature spotlights how both teachers and students are using digital tools and technologies to re-read, re-write, and restory YAL today.  Primarily, this text provides pedagogical approaches and resources for English language arts (ELA) educators to integrate shifts in textuality and the availability of participatory digital networks into their classroom. We propose Digital YAL and Digital YA Culture as conceptual tools for teachers to learn from the digital restorying practices of young people and fellow educators, and across the book, we demonstrate how teachers can restory text selection, digital access, white curricula, and multimodality in their classroom, doing so in pursuit of more just teaching and learning for today’s digital era.

Zapata demonstrates how to reinvigorate aesthetic and critical response in early childhood and elementary classrooms through literature explorations of diverse picturebook collections. Drawing on classroom practices, she offers approaches and guiding principles that can be tailored to individual contexts through an anti-oppressive lens. Her approach is informed by the ethical work of integrating diverse children’s picturebooks in the classroom, a desire to cultivate a critical literature classroom landscape that resists stereotypical representations of people of color in literature, and a commitment to recentering critical engagement of diverse picturebooks. Part of the Principles in Practice imprint, the book draws on NCTE’s position statement Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature.