One year ago, I began Ethical ELA, a blog about the ethics of teaching English language arts in middle and secondary schools in a time of standards and accountability.
When conversations at faculty meetings focus on teacher evaluation, testing schedules (PARCC, MAP, ACCESS), and data, we silence conversations about the well-being of our students and what education can be. When English department meetings are focused on standardizing the curriculum and common summative assessments, we push to the margins conversations on how to engage students, nurture life-long readers, and inspire critical thinking and activism through and with reading and writing.
Teacher blogs and websites can be a place to commiserate on the downfall of education, but they can also be sites to grapple with problems and inspire solutions. My vision was to publish posts written by teachers to initiate conversations about how we “ought” to teach English and what we “ought” to be talking about when it comes to teaching English language arts.
One year and over one hundred posts later, we’ve started conversations on reading logs, classroom libraries, grades, diverse literature, English language learners, collaboration, celebrating teacher-friends, writing workshop, reading workshop, and more inclusive teaching practices and curriculum. And all these posts have given voice to and brought to the center conversations about how and what we “ought” to teach students of English.
Below you will find a list of our top posts from the year and a special thanks to our teacher-bloggers. I will also be re-posting some of our earlier posts this week so that our new followers can read some of the conversations that began this site.
All Time Top Ten Posts
- Throwing Out Reading Logs (and Homework)
- Top Ten Books to Start a Classroom Library (Plus Ten More)
- Assessment in the Reading Workshop without Grades: What did you read? What did you do with your reading? What did you learn?
- A Letter Home about Grades
- Oversharing in Writing Workshop
- I’m a no grades cheater
- Letting Literature do the Work: How I Started an Inclusive Literature Workshop
- Summer Book Club 2016: Let’s discover books together for the first time
- No Grading: I Think I Did it Wrong
- Imagining a No-Grades Classroom
Ethical ELA’s Teacher-Bloggers
A special thanks to our guest bloggers for their contributions. Your work has furthered our mission to start conversations on the ethics of teaching English language arts and to highlight the very rich and expansive work that is teaching English. From reading comic books to celebrating teacher friends, from reading logs to reading Shakespeare, from portfolio assessments to throwing out grades, we are uncovering what English teachers do for our students, schools, and humanity.
- Throwing Out Reading Logs (and Homework) by Lisa Nassar
- Coteachers Share Graphic and Verse Novels for 8th Grade Readers by Laura Robinson and Anna Paprocki
- Huckishness: Spoon-Fed Classics, Worthy Objectives, and a Reflective Mindset by Cameron Gale
- Building Community through Collaboration, Readers Choose: The Classroom Library, and Reading Workshop: Losing the Fear of Sharing Control, an Epilogue by Lesley Roessing
- Let Them Read Comics by Paul Brzegowy
- Teaching LGBQT Themes with Twelfth Night by Christina Gil
- Teacher Friends by Kate Currie and Marissa DePumpo
- Teacher-Friends by Sarah Donovan and Diane DuBois
- Top Ten Books to Start a Classroom Library (Plus Ten More) by Julie Lucash and Sarah Donovan
- War Fiction: Writing the stories that haven’t been told by Marsha Skrypuch
- English not only helps us understand the world, but ourselves by Fidan Malikova
- Think Like Authors and On ELL Integration and Inclusive Practices Sarah Dollah-Said
Coming Up
This summer, I am hosting four book clubs on Teaching Teens, a group on Facebook.
I also started a You Tube channel where I will post short book talks.
For the 2016-17 school year, we will have more posts on how to sustain the traditions of teaching English as more schools move to 1:1 technology programs.
We are always looking for guest bloggers. Please consider making a contribution. Here is a link to the easy process: Guest Blogger Guide.
Tell us what you think about Ethical ELA.