In this excerpt from Active Literacy Across the Curriculum: Strategies for Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Listening, Heidi Hayes Jacobs advocates developing students' "word power" by borrowing methods from the foreign language classroom. Continue reading...

Can teachers manipulate language to their advantage, as a way of shifting their students' perspectives in a more positive direction? It might sound a little Orwellian, but Steven Kushner, who teaches at Bremen High School in Midlothian, Illinois, has found that taking a page from "Big Brother" can be an effective educational strategy. Continue reading...

If you ask a roomful of students to close their eyes and to picture a person who is suffering from acrophobia ("a morbid fear of great heights"), what will they visualize? Some students might picture a person timorously peering off a cliff while other students might envision a person refusing to clean the gutters of their house's rooftop. Continue reading...

While teaching roots and affixes may help students make sense of unfamiliar words, supplying students with long lists of "word parts" can sometimes be overwhelming and unproductive. In this excerpt from Building Background Knowledge for Academic Achievement: Research on What Works in Schools, academic vocabulary expert Robert J. Marzano explains how to focus instruction on those affixes and roots that will give you the most vocab-enriching bang for your buck! Continue reading...

I do not have any sisters. I have but one sibling, a beloved brother, Poopie (not his real name). I'm blessed in that over the course of my life, I have made very close female friends who feel like family to me, but no actual sisters of the Lord-Help-The-Mister-Who-Comes-Between-Me-and-My-Sister type. Maybe that is why I've long been fascinated with Louisa May Alcott's classic American novel, Little Women, about four sisters. Continue reading...

You may have heard the educational buzz phrase "essential question" a lot lately, but do you really know what it means? Or how to develop meaningful essential questions of your own? In this excerpt from Learning to Question to Wonder to Learn, technology and teaching guru Jamie McKenzie, Ed.D. explains what makes some questions "essential" and provides some examples for every grade level. Continue reading...

It's an age-old quandary: what to do about the lack of a gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun in English? Writing teacher Margaret Hundley Parker tackles this grammatical stumbling block, drawing on her experience in the college classroom — on both sides of the pedagogical divide. Continue reading...