TR 8. Writing and Reading in the Classroom, by James
Britton (a joint report with the Center for the Study of
Reading). Britton explores the classroom as an environment
for literacy and literacy learning. He discusses ways in
which teachers have developed strategies for encouraging
children to learn to write-and-read--activities that have
often been dissociated in classrooms but that together
create a literacy learning environment. August, 1987; 25
pages; $4.00.
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TR 65. Student Portfolios and Teacher Logs: Blueprint
for a Revolution in Assessment, by Robert C. Calfee
and Pam Perfumo. This report reviews the concept of
alternative assessment in a specific situation: teacher
assessment of student achievement in the language arts in
the elementary grades. Calfee and Perfumo first present
preliminary findings from a survey of portfolio practice
in selected elementary programs throughout the United
States. They then present a new concept, the Teacher
Logbook, designed to support and effectuate the portfolio
approach, and to connect portfolios to other facets of
teacher professionalization. April, 1993; 12 pages; $3.50.
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OP 26. High School English and the Teacher-Student
Writing Conference: Fine-Tuned Duets in the Ensemble
of the Classroom, by Melanie Sperling. Sperling provides
a glimpse into an urban ninth-grade English classroom and
examines some of the teacher-student conferences that take
place there. She shows that even if a secondary school
teacher lacks time for lengthy one-to-one interactions,
the teacher's brief conversations with individual students
can play an important role in writing instruction. May,
1991; 10 pages; $3.50.
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OP 28. A Social Perspective on Informal Assessment:
Voices, Texts, Pictures, and Play from a First
Grade, by Sarah Merritt and Anne Haas Dyson. This paper
focuses on a first grade classroom in a multi-ethnic urban
school and discusses the ways in which Merritt, as the
classroom teacher, informally assesses the progress of her
students. Merritt and Dyson show how a teacher, like an
archaeologist gathering artifacts, can use the materials
produced in a classroom's social community to search for
clues that make clear how and what children are learning
and how teachers might best support that learning.
September, 1991; 24 pages; $4.00.
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OP 30. Untracking Advanced Placement English: Creating
Opportunity is Not Enough, by Joan Kernan Cone. In this
paper, Cone describes what happened when she opened up her
Advanced Placement English class at an urban high school
to any students who were willing to commit to a rigorous
regimen of reading and writing. She discusses the changes
she made in her teaching strategies in order to make
success possible for all of her students, many of whom had
never been in an advanced English class before. April,
1992; 10 pages; $3.50.
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OP 33. Video Resources for the Teaching of Literacy: An
Annotated Bibliography, by James E. Lobdell and Sandra
R. Schecter. Lobdell and Schecter review available video
resources in literacy education, with an emphasis on
videos which feature teachers and learners in action. For
each entry, they indicate audiences for which the video
may hold special appeal and specific topic or problem
areas about which the video may prove insightful.
September, 1993; 17 pages; $3.50.
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OP 37. What's Involved?: Setting up a Writing Exchange,
by Sarah Warshauer Freedman. This paper describes a
writing exchange pairing classes in the San Francisco Bay
Area, grades six through nine, with classes in inner-city
London. Through these writing exchanges pairs of teachers
on both sides of the Atlantic worked to get students
seriously involved in using written language, especially
students with long histories of school failure. Freedman
shows how writing substantial pieces for a distant but
real whole-class audience helped students to care about
their writing and make significant strides as writers.
June, 1994; 26 pages; $4.00.
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OP 40. Revealing the Teacher-as-Reader: A Framework for
Discussion and Learning, by Melanie Sperling. Based on
detailed observations of an eleventh-grade English
teacher's responses to her students' writing, Sperling
offers a framework for thinking about the perspective
teachers bring to reading students' writing. In her
framework, Sperling identifies five key ways that this
teacher reader oriented herself to her student writers and
their writing, and suggests that other teachers in other
settings can put the observations derived from this case
to the test of their own classroom experiences. March,
1995; 12 pages; $3.50.
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OP 41. ... And Justice for All, by Griselle M. Diaz-Gemmati.
In this essay, Diaz-Gemmati, an eighth grade English teacher
and a teacher researcher affiliated with the Center's M-CLASS
project, writes about the surprising friction and division
that occurred when her students began to explore themes of
racism and prejudice through literature and writing. Although
the students were from diverse racial heritages, they had
always gotten along well until the their diverse views of
racism became an explicit part of classroom life. Diaz-Gemmati
describes the process by which her students were able to work
through their differences and come to a new understanding of
one another. June 1995; 24 pages; $4.00.
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