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"I know that as a former English teacher, movement found its way into many of my "special" lessons, but it was often a missing ingredient of daily instruction. When the main focus of a lesson was reading and writing (as many are in the English classroom), movement was minimal. I've included some strategies that teachers of any content area can use to integrate movement into lessons.  When you have a lesson that looks "sedentary," integrating one of these strategies will surely increase students' learning and engagement."

"I know that as a former English teacher, movement found its way into many of my "special" lessons, but it was often a missing ingredient of daily instruction. When the main focus of a lesson was reading and writing (as many are in the English classroom), movement was minimal. I've included some strategies that teachers of any content area can use to integrate movement into lessons.  When you have a lesson that looks "sedentary," integrating one of these strategies will surely increase students' learning and engagement."

"In the 1990s, the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association established national standards for English language arts learners that anticipated the more sophisticated literacy skills and abilities required for full participation in a global, 21st century community. The selected standards, listed in the appendix, served as a clarion call for changes underway today in literacy education."

"Students almost universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding it anyway. Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don't fully grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is about simply making things up and constructing increasingly circuitous arguments by way of support. So what would happen if we ditched this sacred teaching technique? For starters, we could help students read more. Speeding things up might make it easier to grasp--and appreciate--the overall arc of a book, while allowing the opportunity for real connection with the characters and plot. You can't do that at the pace of a chapter a week. Furthermore, aiming for fifteen books a year, rather than five, might expose the students to more good literature . If the goal of an English class is to improve students' grasp of language, introduce them to great literature, and--hopefully--get students excited, then there's really no downside to this approach. If a few students really want to do close reading, they can do it as an elective or jump in head first in college. Otherwise, let's chuck the concept. We gain nothing by teaching kids to hate books--and hate them s-l-o-w-l-y. "

"In New York City, 26 percent of students in third through eighth grade passed the state exams in English, and 30 percent passed in math, according to the New York State Education Department. The exams were some of the first in the nation to be aligned with a more rigorous set of standards known as Common Core, which emphasize deep analysis and creative problem-solving. Last year, under an easier test, 47 percent of city students passed in English, and 60 percent in math."

This guide is written for teachers and students who are studying Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird. The guide is written specifically for students in the UK, but I hope it may be helpful to users from other parts of the world. To Kill a Mockingbird is a set text for GCSE exams in English literature. It may also be studied for teacher-assessed coursework in English in Key Stages 3 and 4 (GCSE reading

"Morone, with the backing of the high school district's administration, has developed an "open classroom" curriculum for all of the sophomore honors English students where students are given independence to demonstrate they have mastered the same standards the school has been using for years. "We are using the same core texts, the same curriculum designed by the school and approved by the board of education - but the way we are approaching the curriculum is very different," Morone said. "The first word that has to be put out there about it is that it is non-linear." Dr. Barry Bachenheimer, the regional director of curriculum in the district, said Morone's class is part of a "larger idea" of allowing flexibility to foster learning in the Pascack Valley High School District - which includes the "Pascack Period," a weekly 88-minute period where students can study, work out or sign up for non-traditional classes taught by teachers and even students. "

""The best literary precedent for what we're enduring now is not the static image of Big Brother but the turbulent eruptions of King Lear," wrote the Washington Post's Ron Charles in May. Or is it The Handmaid's Tale, also an Amazon top seller? Or, maybe, Brave New World? America's high school English teachers are asking the same questions. After watching the tumult of the 2016 presidential election play out inside their classrooms last year, and after a summer of hate-filled violence, many are retooling the reading lists and assignments they typically give their students. They worry that the classic high school canon doesn't sufficiently cover today's most pressing themes-questions about alienation and empathy and power-and that the usual writing prompts aren't enough to get students thinking deeper than an average cable news segment."

"For 75 years, the Free Library of Philadelphia has held a rare, annotated copy of a First Folio of William Shakespeare, one of just 233 in the world. But nobody knew who had made the notes in the margins, correcting typos and highlighting where Shakespeare deviated from iambic pentameter. Until now, when a Cambridge University fellow and Penn State English professor revealed that the Free Library's First Folio was likely annotated and owned by English poet John Milton. Milton experts and curators of early books all over the world say that this could be one of the most important literary discoveries of our time."

"During my years as an English teacher, camouflage had been easy to come by. I concentrated on 19th-century writers Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman and a bit of Edgar Allan Poe. I kept their poetry safely packaged in a crate padded with literary scholarship. But paging through a copy of the New Yorker and seeing a poem by, say, Terrance Hayes left me feeling like a dog trying to use his owner's iPhone. With "The Life of a Poet," this new quarterly series sponsored by the Library of Congress, I'd committed to what felt like an act of guaranteed humiliation: interviewing the most accomplished poets in the country without having the foggiest idea what their poetry meant. In the early years, I can't claim to have attained a great deal of insight, but a funny thing happened in the crucible of my quarterly terror: I stopped reading poetry like a panicked codebreaker. That is, I stopped demanding that every poem yield its concealed meaning, which I suppose is the legacy of outmoded high school English classes. Instead I just read - often aloud - letting the words flow over me and affect me however they could."

"The goal of any close reading is the following: an ability to understand the general content of a text even when you don't understand every word or concept in it. an ability to spot techniques that writers use to get their ideas and feelings across and to explain how they work. an ability to judge whether techniques the writer has used succeed or fail and an ability to compare and contrast the successes and failures of different writers' techniques. Remember-when doing a close reading, the goal is to closely analyze the material and explain why details are significant. Therefore, close reading does not try to summarize the author's main points, rather, it focuses on "picking apart" and closely looking at the what the author makes his/her argument, why is it interesting, etc. Here are a few of the helpful questions to consider in close reading, from the handout by  Kip Wheeler, a college English professor:"

"English teachers, I ask that you incorporate more sci-fi into your curriculum. Librarians, bring books into your libraries that include protagonists of all shapes, shades, and perspectives. Other educators, think about the following: how other books beyond 1984 can help us examine polities; how books set in the distant future can help us teach evolutionary biology; what dystopian novels about despotic regimes can teach children about a school's zero-tolerance policies. We shouldn't be in the business of fostering mindless containers of knowledge, and science fiction can be an invaluable tool for examining and improving the learning environments we create for our students."

"The balanced move is best exemplified by a famous catchphrase spoken by Muhammad Ali as a young boxer: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee." This compound sentence (made up of two equally important main clauses) balances like a seesaw on the pivot of that comma and gains extra strength from its parallel structure, equal syntactical units to express meaning of equal weight. The mirror images go like this: imperative verb, preposition, article, noun. Even with all these, the two halves aren't precisely equal. The difference between butterfly and bee - the first word long and lyrical, the second short and sharp - creates both rhythm and contrast. Ali is both the beauty and the beast. Balance, sentence structure, verb forms, emphatic word order, parallelism, even the history of the English language (Anglo Saxon meets Norman French) are working their magic in this iconic line, coming from a man who was sometimes disparaged as the Louisville Lip."

"New Jersey has become the second state to require students to pass the PARCC exam in order to graduate from high school. The New Jersey Board of Education voted Wednesday to begin the requirement with the class of 2021. Currently, New Jersey students must pass a test to graduate, but they can choose which one: PARCC, ACT Aspire, the ACT, PSAT or SAT; Accuplacer, or the ASVAB-AFQT (military entrance exam). They can also opt to demonstrate mastery of subject matter through a portfolio presentation. The board's vote means that as of 2021, only two graduation options will be available to New Jersey students: First they must try to score "proficient" on the PARCC exams in 10th grade English/language arts and Algebra I. If they can't, they may submit a portfolio appeal. "

"In the middle of the school year, I always regret my choice of becoming an AP and Honors English teacher. Not because I hate to teach, but because I'm always swimming in essays that I have to grade. In order to accommodate the load, I adapted the elementary way of thinking and formed a writers' workshop for my own classroom. Once they participate in the workshop, students are able to learn how to revise their own essays. Because of this, the time it takes for me to grade essays is literally cut in half. Suggestions for Implementing a Writers' Workshop in Your Classroom"

To mark the 200th birthday of "Frankenstein," we have updated our older Learning Network lessons with recent Times resources to pair with the text. We also provide teaching ideas related to theme and suggest activities for students. Continue reading the main story Lesson Plans English Language Arts AUG 31 Social Studies AUG 31 Science & Math AUG 31 E.L.L. & Arts AUG 31 Current Events AUG 31 See More » "

"Language merely reflects our way of trying to make sense of the world. - Frank Smith Frank Smith (1982) says 'writing touches every part of our lives'. One of the first reasons we write is because it is a tool for communication in culture. It gives us the ability the share information over time and space with multiple individuals (explaining, recounting & opinion). It can also be used as a permanent record or as a statement e.g. in history, geography  & science genres. The third cultural aspect for writing is artistry (narrative and poetry). Finally, there is also the personal aspect to writing. Writing allows us all to reflect, express our perceptions of self, to socially dream or to be critical (memoir). By writing, we find out what we know; what we think. Ultimately though, writing is a means for us to express ourselves in the world, make sense of the world or impose ourselves upon it. The question now is why do children write at school? For these purposes? - Not often. There is a massive discrepancy between the writing done in the real-world and that of the classroom. Donald Graves says 'all children want to write'. It is just a case of allowing them to write about the things they are interested in. As Frank Smith says, 'all children can write if they can speak it.' If they can talk about it, they can write it down. The transmission of narrow decontextualized writing skills; that English is just a formal system to be learnt. The insistence on task-orientated writing. The insistence on teacher-chosen writing tasks. The insistence on the use of external stimulus (literature units, film-clips, topic-writing) at the expense of children's knowledge, interests, loves, talents and idiosyncrasies. The formal rather than functional teaching of grammar. These examples embody the 'commonsense' assumptions which claim an authority which is supposedly natural and unshakable. Writing in classrooms at present isn't seen by children as important

"Ah, listening, the neglected literacy skill. I know when I was a high school English teacher this was not necessarily a primary focus; I was too busy honing the more measurable literacy skills -- reading, writing, and speaking. But when we think about career and college readiness, listening skills are just as important. This is evidenced by the listening standards found in the Common Core and also the integral role listening plays in collaboration and communication, two of the four Cs of 21st century learning. So how do we help kids become better listeners? Check out these tactics for encouraging a deeper level of listening that also include student accountability:"

"In a small Southern town during the Jim Crow era, a black man is accused of raping a white woman. During his stormy trial there are threats of lynching, as well as intimations that the white woman had been the sexual aggressor. That tale summarizes the plot of Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," a staple of high school English courses. But it also describes part of the more complicated and less morally uplifting real-life story told in "Willie McGee and the Traveling Electric Chair," a half-hour documentary to be broadcast Friday on NPR stations as part of the "Radio Diaries" series (www.radiodiaries.org)."

"Through independent reading children gain a wealth of background knowledge about many different things, come to understand story and non-fiction structures, absorb the essentials of English grammar, and continuously expand their vocabularies. "

"Below, all our E.L.A. and arts-related posts. On June 11 we'll publish a list of all of the Student Opinion questions we have asked this year. And if you'd like to go further, here are five more years' worth of lesson plan collections for English language arts, from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014."