Using popular culture resources to engage learners. Middle level teachers can make learning engaging by using popular culture texts. When faced with the challenge of engaging students, many teachers often struggle to create relevant learning experiences while also meeting the needs of each learner. Four teachers at an Atlanta area school learned to integrate various
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Effective ways to enhance reading and writing experiences. Recently, I was teaching a language arts class in Logan, West Virginia. The objective of the lesson was to analyze the impact of tradition on human behavior using narrative text. Sounds really dull, doesn’t it? It could have been, had I not used engaging strategies to facilitate
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Teaching students to skim and scan can hone their skills for college and beyond. Regardless of their achievement level, students sometimes reach the end of a difficult reading passage with no recollection or understanding of what they have read. Even highly proficient readers may find themselves struggling with long and intricate textbook chapters and research
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Films can—and should—be more than time-killers in your classroom. We all know the stereotypical image of the teacher who, tired of direct instruction, dims the lights, turns on the DVD player, and sits quietly while students stare at the screen. The problem here is not that students are watching a film in class—it’s that the
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Graffiti murals promote comprehension and student voice. Some see graffiti as vandalism; others see it as a work of art. Urban artists use graffiti to send political messages—as a form of meaning making in the larger society. Indiana University Professor David Hanauer suggests that graffiti offers marginal groups the opportunity to express themselves publicly. In the middle
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Exploring the five plagues of complex text. One of the most important aspects of teaching literacy in the classroom is text selection, the process by which teachers choose what their students will read. For many teachers, text selection boils down to choosing something that will engage students and motivate them to read. Reasonable diversity in
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