Bob Fecho

Michelle Falter

Xiaoli Hong

Many educators feel caught between mandates to meet literacy standards and the desire to respond to individual students’ interests, skills, and challenges. This book illustrates how a dialogical approach to practice will enable teachers to meet the needs of today’s diverse student population within a standardized curriculum. Chapters highlight the efforts of four high school teachers to create dialogical classroom space, documenting both the possibilities of and impediments to such an approach to teaching. Drawing on a theoretical framework and rationale for engaged dialogical practice, the authors present and analyze key classroom events that illustrate the productive and restrictive tensions for such work and suggest ways for teachers and schools to implement these ideas, especially for complementing and expanding the Common Core State Standards. Book Features: Examples of teachers using dialogue to engage students, as well as colleagues, administrators, parents, policymakers, and other educational stakeholders.Guidance for teachers in how to differentiate instruction to meet literacy standards.Case studies illustrating how teachers navigate the tension between standardization and student-centered teaching.An exemplary collaborative effort among a university researcher, doctoral students, and high school teachers.The reflections and self-questioning of teachers who write honestly, engagingly, and insightfully about their dialogical practices.

Making Room for Dialogue

Teaching Outside the Box but Inside the Standards

Deborah Appleman

Richard Beach

Rob Simon

This popular textbook introduces prospective and practicing English teachers to current methods of teaching literature in middle and high school classrooms. It underscores the value of providing students with a range of different critical approaches and tools for interpreting texts and the need to organize literature instruction around topics and issues of interest to them. Throughout the textbook, readers are encouraged to raise and explore inquiry-based questions in response to authentic dilemmas and issues they face in the critical literature classroom. New in this edition, the text shows how these approaches to fostering responses to literature also work as rich tools to address the Common Core English Language Arts Standards. Each chapter is organized around specific questions that English educators often hear in working with pre-service teachers. Suggested pedagogical methods are modelled by inviting readers to interact with the book through critical-inquiry methods for responding to texts. Readers are engaged in considering authentic dilemmas and issues facing literature teachers through inquiry-based responses to authentic case narratives. A Companion Website [http://teachingliterature.pbworks.com] provides resources and enrichment activities, inviting teachers to consider important issues in the context of their current or future classrooms.

Teaching Literature to Adolescents

Dawan Coombs

Trevor Thomas Stewart

Todd S. Hawley

A critical resource for pre-service and practicing teachers, this book addresses what happens when new teachers try to enact inquiry-based and dialogical pedagogy within standardized schools. Exploring the narratives from beginning ELA and humanities teachers when they encounter challenges and obstructions, this book explores moments of wobble—key events that called attention to practice in the context of inflexible schooling systems—that the teachers shared with their peers via an oral inquiry process (OIP) to help them unpack and understand their experiences. This book advocates for the continued use and enhancement of mentoring and induction initiatives, particularly those that recognize the expressed concerns of novice teachers, no matter what their pedagogical stance might be. By sharing novice teachers’ "wobble stories" and their outcomes, this book provides a pathway for teachers’ continued self-reflection and growth for the duration of their careers. The authors offer a reflective, adaptable, and easy-to-use process that places teachers in control of their own professional learning. The beliefs and structures examined in this text support the intentions of all teachers who work from a learning-centered perspective and wish to take some ownership of their professional development.

Using Dialogue and Inquiry for Self-Reflection and Growth

Novice Teachers Embracing Wobble in Standardized Schools

Jeffrey Wilhelm

Susan Hynds

Designed to introduce prospective English teachers to current methods of teaching literature in middle and high school classrooms, this popular textbook explores a variety of innovative approaches that incorporate reading, writing, drama, talk, and media production. Each chapter is organized around specific questions that English educators often hear in working with preservice teachers. The text engages readers in considering the dilemmas and issues facing literature teachers through inquiry-based responses to authentic case narratives. A Companion Website, http://teachingliterature.pbworks.com, provides resources and enrichment activities, inviting teachers to consider important issues in the context of their own current or future classrooms. New in the second edition: more attention to the use of digital texts from use of online literature to digital storytelling to uses of online discussion and writing tools incorporated throughout new chapter on teaching young adult literature new chapter on teaching reading strategies essential to interpreting literature more references to examples of teaching multicultural literature.

Bob Fecho

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