Aric Foster is our guest blogger this week. He is offering another perspective on the student teaching experience–the university-cohort liaison. Never satisfied with his own teaching and ardently passionate about student learning, Aric has been teaching English 11 and AP Literature for 16 years in a …
Teachers as Writers: Becoming Part of Your Classroom Writing Community
At Ethical ELA, we believe in the power of writing to inform and transform. We write to write; to reflect on our teaching; to recognize that for change to happen, we have to act deliberately; to challenge the status quo; to celebrate the “good” in …
Becoming Part of the Reading Community
by Lesley Roessing I considered myself to be a very involved middle-level ELA reading teacher. I loved to read, and I loved to share books with my students. I book-talked books that I read and thought some of my readers would enjoy reading. I continually …
Anthologies: Limitations in Higher Education
by Elaine Magin Ethical ELA resonates with my own experiences as a teacher who often feels limited by what I’m able to teach in the classroom. Even though this blog is not focused on teaching English language arts in higher education, I am overwhelmed by …
Listening to Students
“Listening means creating an audience for children. And one of the best ways to pull children forward into literacy is to become an active, interested audience in their reading lives” (59, No More Reading for Junk).
A Little Reading & Writing, and A Lot of Building Community
I have found that before people can accept and value diversity in others, they need to first see similarities. Teachers and students need to learn more than each others’ names; it vital that they learn about each other, who they are. It is important that teachers help students to forge new friendships, for each class to form an “Us,” rather than and “Us” and “Them.”
Building Community through Collaboration by Lesley Roessing
Originally published on January 24, 2016, Ethical ELA is re-posting “Building Community” by Lesley Roessing as a call to all teachers to make building community a priority in the first weeks of your school year and to nurture community every step of the way. _____________________________________________________________________________ …
Review of Nobody Nowhere The Extraordinary Autobiography of An Autistic by Donna Williams
As a teacher, I found myself stopping and wondering: Do I often only hear babbling where there is, in fact, poetry? How do my assumptions and expectations for student writing and communication block a student’s ability to communicate? Do my expectations work against my intentions?
Reading Workshop: Losing the Fear of Sharing Control, an Epilogue
Originally published September 7, 2015. Lesley Roessing has been an invaluable resource for Ethical ELA, and her contributions on the Facebook page Teaching Teens and its book groups are just priceless. Thank you, Lesley. ____________________________________________________________ In Losing the Fear of Sharing Control: Starting a Reading Workshop, Lesley …
Easing into writing poetry and uncovering the power of an open mic
National Poetry Month comes around every April, and it is a time to remember and to celebrate poetry as writers, as readers, as human beings. Most ELA teachers know that reading poems and writing poems go hand in hand. Still, not everyone has uncovered and …