Language and Literacy Education Commons^™

Best Practices In Online Course Design That Help Eliminate Learning Fatigue, Valarie Anderson O'Bryan

The Utah English Journal

Even though students have returned to learning in-person in schools, many districts require teachers to maintain an online course (usually using Canvas). When teachers use best practices when designing online learning content, students are less likely to experience frustration and learning fatigue.

Combatting The Inevitable: Reflective Writing In Response To Student Struggles, Kaylee Smedley

The Utah English Journal

'Teachers and students, we need all of you to immediately go into lockdown procedures. Again, please begin lockdown procedures."

That announcement had interrupted our freshman English class nearly two hours earlier, and yet the only updates we had were frantic texts and social media updates from friends and family members regarding a report of someone with a weapon on Provo High's campus. As I huddled in the book corner surrounded by my fifth period class, a million different thoughts rushed through my head. More than fear, all I could think about were the logistics. What if the culprit came to …

Voices With Power: Writing To Effect Change In 8th Grade, Emily Brown

The Utah English Journal

"Slow walkers."

"Seniors crowding the hallways."

"When teachers write crookedly on the board."

The minute I read the writing prompt for the day-"What is one of your biggest pet peeves?"-the response from my 8th graders is electrifying and instantaneous. Responses like the ones above begin flying around the room, and I have to loudly remind them, "Write first, share second!" because everyone is immediately ready to rant. I call this my Soapbox Day. It's a day where I make sure to devote enough time for students to write substantial responses and then "get on their soapboxes" to share these rants. …

Teach Me The Language Of The Bear, Rachel Stanger

The Utah English Journal

No abstract provided.

Book Review: Aristotle And Dante Dive Into The Waters Of The World, Corinne Downs

The Utah English Journal

Saenz has intimately captured the somber beauty that is shedding childhood off and stepping into the paths of adulthood. In his sequel Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World, readers find themselves continuing on in Dante's journey. This shy, quiet, and recluse character continues to find himself through moments of ecstasy and grief throughout his senior year of high school.

Book Review: From A Whisper To A Rallying Cry: The Killing Of Vincent Chin And The Trial That Galvanized The Asian American Movement, Krista Hong Edwards

The Utah English Journal

Part historical investigation, part modern-day reflection on identity, and part court drama, Paula Yoo's From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry takes the reader through a rather unknown, yet incredibly important moment in American history. Recognizing that several individuals in this story live in 2022, she sensitively examines the 1982 case of Vincent Chin: a Chinese-American man who was violently killed mere days before his wedding. Vincent was celebrating his bachelor party at a gentlemen's club when the night turned violent and volatile, and two white men employed at an automobile plant pursued Vincent across town to beat him to …

Book Review: The Legend Of Auntie Po, Katy Bigham

The Utah English Journal

Mei is an average thirteen-year-old Chinese-American girl. She loves spending time with her best friend, Bee ( whom she also is developing budding romantic feelings for); baking pie with her father; and dreaming of attending a university somewhere far from home. She tells fascinating stories that leave the neighborhood children enraptured and helps her dad at work however she can. But Mei lives in a Sierra Nevada logging camp in 1885, which makes her life dramatically more complicated.

Book Review: Tokyo Ever After, Grace Houston

The Utah English Journal

Izumi Tanaka goes by "Izzy" - not because she prefers it, as she claims, but because it's easier in her small town in northern California. She and her three best friends are the only Asian-American girls at their school. Together they face the struggles of being Asian-American in a mostly white small town. That is, until a discovery changes Izumi's entire world.

Book Review: A Teacher's Guide To Writing Workshop Minilessons, Belinda 'Ofakihevahanoa Fotu

The Utah English Journal

Eickholdt and Vitale-Reilly's A Teacher's Guide to Writing Workshop Minilessons is a 125 page writing instructor's manual marketed for teachers of k-8 grades. Colors regale the broad cover and every page throughout, with pages sometimes devoted just to one large blocked quote and pictures of writing carpets and writers' cubbies. Every visual and tactile indicator of this book impresses the reader that this is a text meant for teachers of small children; even so, A Teacher's Guide to Writing Workshop Minilessons is a manual of writing techniques applicable to any level of writing.

Teaching Grammar: One Day At A Time, Jenny Dunn

The Utah English Journal

When I first started teaching grammar to my high school students, I had to study up every class period to make sure I was teaching things correctly. It took me several years to feel comfortable and confident in my abilities.

However, even after seven years of teaching grammar to high schoolers (and five before that teaching junior high students), there are multiple times a year when my students ask me a question I do not know the answer to. Instead of panicking, making something up, or brushing it off as an unimportant principle, I simply say, "That's a good question. …

What Matters Most: Vision Boards For Unit Planning In The English Classroom, Johnny Allred, Corinne Downs

The Utah English Journal

In his first year as a high school teacher, Johnny sat down at the computer to plan a narrative writing unit centered on the text Chasing Lincoln's Killer. He stared at a blank unit plan template for a few minutes while crickets chirped loudly in his head-he had no idea where to begin! Sure, he was a first year teacher, but he had been well-trained in the art of lesson and unit-planning, and he was confident in his ability to teach. Why was this so difficult? What skills and knowledge really mattered for his students? What assessments could he develop …

Book Review: A Snake Falls To Earth, Heidi Stone

The Utah English Journal

Nina, a Lipan girl from Earth, and Oli, a Cottonmouth Snake from the Reflection World, are drawn together to save those who they love the most. Little Badger utilizes traditional Lipan Apache storytelling techniques to draw the reader into the stories of the animal people, monsters, and the importance of family.

Book Review: Kaleidoscope, Justin Scholes

The Utah English Journal

Characteristic of his award-winning style, Brian Selznick's newest book, Kaleidoscope (2021) blends text and beautiful pencil drawings that push readers to consider meaning in words and images. The book features twenty-four short stories, and as the title suggests, each story is a glimpse into a world, a life, a perspective.

Book Review: Ophelia After All, Madison Simpson

The Utah English Journal

Ophelia Rojas has always been the girl who is obsessed with boys. As a senior in high school, she can't remember a time when she wasn't crushing on a cute boy or dreaming of a perfect prom night. Ophelia is also curating her perfect garden as she dreams of studying botany at university, much to her English professor mother's chagrin. When Ophelia starts developing an unexpected crush, she begins to rethink everything she thought she knew about herself.

Book Review: The Girl From The Sea, Austin Andruski

The Utah English Journal

The Girl from the Sea, a graphic novel by Molly Knox Ostertag, is an emotionally rejuvenating tale of young love and self-identity. For Morgan, she wants nothing more than to fit in until she can graduate from high school and leave her island home, finally able to be herself away from people who might judge her.

Process Interviews, Joe Anson

The Utah English Journal

In an attempt to have the students care more about how they could improve their writing, I decided to focus on the writing process as opposed to the final product. And because students start with varying shades of writing aptitude, I felt it important that all the writers in my classroom be given the chance to earn a high grade as we focused on improving writing, not writing perfectly.

Using Inquiry To Drive Revision, Mercedes Allen

The Utah English Journal

When an object needs motion, it needs something to cause movement, to drive it. A car needs gasoline. A kite needs wind. A runner needs nutrient rich food and plenty of water. Just like these things need a substance or force to keep them going, students need something to fuel them as they go through the writing process. While it would be much simpler for us to give students crackers or suckers to fix a student with writer's block, there is something else we can implement into our classrooms daily to give our students the power to continue to move …

Book Review: Ain't Burned All The Bright, Rachel Billings

The Utah English Journal

Ain't Burned All the Bright captures the anxieties, fears, and tensions of 2020 clearly and vividly even though it consists of only three long sentences. Jason Reynolds tells the story of a Black boy and his family during the Covid-19 quarantine and pandemic. Through the prose of Reynolds and illustrations of Jason Griffin, the reader learns what the pandemic was like from the point of view of a typical teenager.

An Incomplete Success, Elva Shule Escobedo

The Utah English Journal

Once, I wrote a letter to my US senator, a request from my older brother who had left the country voluntarily just a few months before. In the letter, I explained my brother's complicated situation with his legal status and pleaded for his case. This letter became the catalyst for a writing assignment in my classroom. Students wanted to write their own letters and pleas to government officials, too, explaining their different family members' situations in hopes that their letters would make a difference. And so, they set out to write. They wrote like I had never seen them write. …

Playing With Poetry, Jessica Ashurst

The Utah English Journal

In my experience, the average student claims that they hate poetry. But, what if we try to get them to experience poetry by trying it in various forms instead of just digging for meaning in obscure poetry? This poetry unit encourages them to play with words and author's craft choices. Each poem becomes part of the poetry portfolio they tum in at the end of the unit.

Practices For Professional Learning When Composing Teaching Materials, Jessica Rivera-Mueller

The Utah English Journal

As teachers, we know that reflection is essential for professional learning. However, it can be challenging to find time to engage in reflective experiences that prompt meaningful learning, especially in this historical moment. For many of us, time has become increasingly scarce during the past two years as we have navigated new and uncertain teaching conditions. Like many teachers, I had to spend additional time creating teaching materials and learning experiences for delivery in new and multiple contexts. I spent the early months of the pandemic just keeping up with daily teaching demands-even though I value the activity of reflection. …

Scary Character And Setting Vignettes, Melissa Heaton

The Utah English Journal

Most students know how to write stories, but their stories are often void of description and life. Instead of my students writing whole narratives, I have them focus their mental binoculars by writing snippets of stories that I call Scary Character and Setting Vignettes.

Book Review: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain In A Digital World, Leah Day

The Utah English Journal

Decades ago, Jeff Goldblum delivered some of the greatest wisdom of our time in his iconic role as Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park. Chastising the myopic man responsible for bringing back dinosaurs, he explains, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, that you didn't stop to think if they should." As our schools race toward 1: 1 student/ device ratios and parents give tablets and smartphones to their kids at younger and younger ages, it's hard to deny that we might be as reckless as those darn dino lovers. Maryanne Wolf is not a doomsdayer or a luddite, …

Book Review: Where I End And You Begin, Michelle Ritter

The Utah English Journal

Ezra Slevin is a typical teenager who has crushing insomnia, an identity crisis, and a crush on Imogen - a girl who barely knows he exists. Wynonna Jones is Imogen's overprotective best friend who has a crush on his best friend, Holden, and who has made it her mission to torment Ezra for as long as he can remember. To ramp up the teenage angst, Ezra has been working up the courage to ask Imogen to prom but can't even seem to talk in her presence.

When Mentor Texts Fail, Build More Bridges, Deborah Dean

The Utah English Journal

I was teaching a writing class and students were writing research-based papers, an expectation of the course and one that met several learning standards. I understood the course expectations, but I wanted to move away from the traditional, school-based "research paper," a genre I disliked reading and students disliked writing, to a genre I was willing to read and one that exists in the real world: TED talks. I thought that if we focused on informational TED talks, we would meet the expectations for the course but also create a more interesting and transferable learning experience for them and-I hoped-one …

Lighting Fires: Inspiring Lifelong Reading, Jessica Ashurst

The Utah English Journal

It's a real problem: to this day, I've loved every single book my English teachers have placed in my hands, falling in love with Ponyboy, cheering on Jonas when he snuck out of The Community, and crying through the pages where Billy lost both Old Dan and Little Ann.

But when I became an English teacher, I mentally braced myself that not all of my students would love reading as I do. The majority of my students consider themselves "non-readers" and they claim that the main culprit of this problem is that they are "required" to read books. I mustered …

The Genre Reading Challenge, Georgina Dibble

The Utah English Journal

When I walked into my own classroom for the first time five years ago, I was met with the stark reality of students with low reading levels, low comprehension, kids who didn't read, didn't like reading, and adamantly believed that they couldn't read. But, fresh out of college, I was also coming armed with the words of Donalyn Miller, Kylene Beers, Kelly Gallagher, and more, ready to transform my students into life-long, independent readers who read just for the pure joy of it. If you're rolling your eyes at my optimism, I don't blame you. But the research surrounding reading …

Discoveries And Decisions Regarding Classroom Library, Amanda Thomas

The Utah English Journal

One of the great benefits of being a classroom teacher-a perk that drew me to the profession-is that my classroom becomes a rare combination of office and second bedroom. Naturally, a teacher wants to keep the decor somewhat relevant to the subject area and avoid anything that might cross boundaries of propriety, but there's a lot of wiggle room to show personal touches, passions, hobbies, and flair.

Fanboys, Pow, & Mount Plot: Mnemonic Devices Used In Teaching Writing, Sarah Anderson, Alexa Bills, Kaitlyn Conlin, Eve Crawford, Natalie Eggli, Jenae Grant, Lilly Hammer, Andrew Isaacson, Kassandra Jimenez, Ryan Mansfield, Brindley Rowley, Samantha Stringham, Meghan Waldenberg, Brady Wallis, Joyce Kinkead

The Utah English Journal

Cicero ( 106-43 BCE) was renowned during his lifetime and influential long after as an extraordinary orator and writer, able to recall long speeches from memory. A technique termed the memory palace, which associates memory with locations-also called method of loci-enabled ancient rhetoricians to deliver stimulating speeches. Retention of information was essential for delivering speeches not just because it was impressive but also due to the paucity of writing materials. Writers and orators relied on wax tablets that could be inscribed with a stylus but could not archive the text; as a result, the information had to be memorized, part …

Musical Notes For Literature, Jake Rees

The Utah English Journal

I try not to say the f-word very often in class, but I can't do anything about my students using it. True, they usually put a qualifier in front of it: "sort of fun," "kind of fun," and (cringe) "lowkey fun."

Here's the activity they're talking about: We start most classes listening to a song (usually just a portion of it--my students and I quickly learned that a repetitive chorus is intolerable for everyone in this context). I project the lyrics on the board, and we talk about what we notice. That's it.