Bridging the Literacy Gap in Science

Bridging the Literacy Gap in Science

How do you teach the new science standards to students who struggle with reading and writing? Many middle school science teachers face this dilemma, which is especially challenging for science educators at my school. Like many urban schools across the country, we have a large population of students who are behind academically; many have specific learning difficulties. We also serve a large population of English Language Learners.

How can we ensure the success of these students and bridge their literacy gaps?

The South Carolina Department of Education (SCDE) developed new science standards in 2014 that are based on the Framework for K-12 Science Education. These new standards require students to develop and use models, obtain and use information, analyze and interpret data, and construct scientific arguments. SCDE also expects students to use reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills throughout their scientific processes. Meeting these requirements can be difficult for students who struggle with reading and writing. They also challenge teachers to bridge the learning gap and develop students' abilities to successfully use these higher-order literacy skills.

Scaffolding Learning

AMLE talks to Theressa Varner about Bridging the Literacy Gap in Science

Students are expected not only to be immersed in authentic science investigations, but also to effectively communicate what they learned during those investigations using observable and measurable information and accurate science terminology. With that in mind, I combined several tried and true, research-supported strategies to scaffold my students' learning and bridge their literacy gaps.

Prior to doing an investigation, students learn key vocabulary terms in order to communicate their findings. They use graphic organizers to compare and contrast concepts, and they engage in argument writing using evidence to support their claims.

According to Nicole Stants in her 2013 NSTA Science Scope article, "Parts Cards: Using Morphemes to Teach Science Vocabulary," teachers can use morphemes—prefixes, suffixes, and root words—to help students learn vocabulary. So, we break down words into these basic components. When students become familiar with common morphemes, they can use that knowledge to determine the meaning of unfamiliar words.

Each week, I also present four new science stems that are associated with our current vocabulary terms. The scholars keep a master list of the stems in the front of their science journal; an entry includes the stem, its definition, the concept that it is related to, and a vocabulary term. They also keep an index card book that includes modified Frayer models for each stem (see Figure 1) that they've constructed.

Another learning strategy is graphic organizers. Students use them to organize notes, classify or categorize information, or compare and contrast concepts. Some graphic organizers also require the students to draw visual models of concepts. BrainPOP ( is a great source for a variety of activities that reinforce science concepts.

Following the 5E Model

All of the lessons follow the 5E Model of Instruction: engage, explore, explain, evaluate, and elaborate. We begin with an engagement activity such as a video or question related to the content being taught, then follow up with an exploration activity. If the engagement or exploration involves text, I use a variety of strategies to help bridge the literacy gap.

For example, sometimes I think aloud while reading the text and have the students follow along. I may divide the text among the students and have them do a jigsaw activity. Each group of students reads and annotates the text using annotation marks that have been standardized and used school-wide. Then, each group presents what they have learned to the rest of the class. As the other groups are "teaching" the rest of the class, students are writing information in their journals.

When the students have completed their presentations, I provide direct instruction related to the text, followed by a check for understanding, such as exit slips or a quick write. Quick writes may require students to answer a question, write a summary, complete a Venn diagram, or write a question of their own.

Next, the students engage in an authentic lab experience or performance assessment. For example, when studying acids and bases, the students participate in an investigation using indicators to identify solutions. They then demonstrate a neutralization reaction between an acid and a base. The students record their observations and write an explanation of what happened when the acid and base were combined.

Writing a descriptive explanation is the most difficult part of a lab experience for my students. I have been working with them on writing from the third-person point of view.

Some educators make the argument for using the first-person in argumentative writing because they believe texts using "I" can be just as well-supported as those that don't. However, my students struggle with starting every sentence with "I think." If they take themselves out of the experience, they are forced to think more critically and objectively about what they want to communicate. I also encourage them to avoid the use of pronouns wherever possible and to write technically using proper science terminology.

Finally, to reinforce the concept, students write an argument based on a real-world scenario. They copy the scenario into their notebook and create a graphic organizer. I provide them with sticky notes on which they write down the evidence to show what happens when an acid and base are combined. All the students place their "evidence" sticky notes in a designated area on the board, and we group them with other similar responses. As a class, we review all of the responses and determine what evidence we want to use.

Step two requires students to repeat the process by writing an inference as to how the scenario could be solved based on the evidence we chose to use. The final step requires them to make a claim by combining their evidence and inference. We review all of the responses as a class.

After the group activity is completed, the students work independently to construct an explanation that solves the scenario. Again, students are required to write in the third person using technical vocabulary.

Bridging the Gap

It is still too early to tell what effect these strategies will have on bridging the literacy gap and helping all my students learn science concepts, but I am confident they will make gains. The strategy extends and expands their scientific reasoning and motivates and focuses their learning, helping all scholars bridge the learning gap.

Theressa Varner is a seventh grade science teacher at the ARMS Academy at Morningside Middle School in Charleston, South Carolina.

Published in AMLE Magazine, August 2016.
Author: Theressa Varner
Number of views (315)/Comments (0)/
One Text—Many Perspectives

One Text—Many Perspectives

Writing and reading "I Am" poetry through different lenses.

  • Where did the pandemic start?
  • How did the pandemic spread?
  • When did the pandemic end?
  • How many Americans died from influenza?
  • From the article, what do you think a pandemic is?

Some students began to read; some peered at the questions on the board and skimmed the article for the answers; some stared at the board, not knowing how to begin.

When they finished the assignment, they had gained neither deep understanding of the pandemic nor empathy for its victims. They had all approached the subject from one perspective—that of middle school students reading about an event that took place a century ago and affected people with whom they felt no connection.

Had students read from a variety of perspectives through the eyes of citizens, doctors, and even President Woodrow Wilson, they might have developed a deeper, broader understanding of the significance of the influenza pandemic that swept the globe, killing an estimated 675,000 people in the United States alone.

They also would have begun to develop life skills, such as empathy, openness to new ways of thinking, and the ability and willingness to think reflectively—all skills that support the Common Core State Standards.

"I Am" Poems

One of the most effective ways to engage students with a text is through "I Am" poems. The I Am poetry format (see chart above) puts the readers into someone else's shoes, so to speak, requiring them to read more deeply, closely, and critically as they explore text from a particular point of view.

I Am poems can be used in all disciplines. In English-Language Arts texts, readers can take on the perspective of major and minor characters and even characters who don't directly appear in the text, such as the residents in the convent across the street from Mr. Pignati's house in The Pigman.

Social studies offers countless opportunities for students to consider the perspective of persons in history, from General William Tecumseh Sherman to a nameless Confederate soldier or a native child forced to walk the Trail of Tears.

Science students can write as a famous scientist, as a scientific phenomenon, as someone affected by a scientific event, or even as a tree. In health classes, students can respond to articles about issues such as concussion in "I Am a Victim of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy" or "I Am a Football Coach."

Incorporating I Am Poetry

Use the following steps to incorporate reading and responding in the I Am poetry format:

  1. Distribute the text to be read.
  2. Assign the reading.
  3. Brainstorm with the class perspectives from which the text can be viewed.
  4. Explain how students will choose the perspective(s) from which they will re-read the text.
  5. Assign students to re-read the text from their chosen perspectives, marking details important to them from that viewpoint. This includes text evidence and inferences based on the text.
  6. Explain the I Am poem format and examine and analyze the text for ideas.
  7. Invite students to revise any verbs that may better fit their interpretations and responses and to add research from other sources.

I distributed the article, "The Great Pandemic of 1918–19," to a class of eighth graders. As they read, they used a during-reading response strategy that I refer to in my book, The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension, as marginal notes. As they read, they marked in the right margin of the article:

√ = I knew this
N = new information (I didn't know this)

! = important information about the pandemic

I then assigned the activity: Write an I Am poem, "I Am a Philadelphian in 1918–1919." The class reflected on the content of the article and brainstormed various perspectives from which readers could re-read the article and write a response.

  • I Am a Man/Woman Living in Philadelphia in 1918–1919
  • I Am a Child Living in Philadelphia in 1918–1919
  • I Am a Victim of The Great Pandemic of 1918–1919
  • I Am a Funeral Director in Philadelphia in 1918–1919
  • I Am the Mayor of Philadelphia, 1918–1919

I added an option to encourage creativity : I Am The Great Pandemic of 1918–1919.

Students based their poems on the facts given in the article, plus personal knowledge and research about influenza, Philadelphia, or the time period.

Students read, wrote, highlighted the facts they used in their poems, added "because" statements wherever appropriate, and shared their favorite lines. Some took their poems home to revise and further research. As they read each other's poetry, the students observed that some classmates focused on the same facts in the same way, some perspectives interpreted the same facts in dissimilar ways, and some regarded different facts in distinct ways.

Sample Perspectives

Hinton wrote from the perspective of a victim. Here is an excerpt:

I am one of the many victims of the Great Pandemic of 1918-1919.

I wonder about the other 675,000 Americans who died, leaving orphans or widows.

I hear about the eighteen cases of influenza that were reported in Kansas.

I see the results of the three waves of the Pandemic that occurred in late spring and summer of 1918, the fall of 1918, and the spring of 1919.

I don't want the recovered men to develop secondary pneumonia, "the most virulent, deadly type."

I am starting to become fearful for the world.

I pretend to be strong.

I feel that the Pandemic shouldn't have spread from the military to the civilian population.

I touch my chest to make sure my heart is still beating.

I worry it will be too late before this outbreak is over.

I cry at the fact it has spread to Asia, Africa, South America, and back to North America.

I am trying to believe that everything will be all right.

The same format in a sixth grade science class required students to choose a famous scientist and conduct online research about that person. Integrating their class notes, they wrote I Am poetry from the perspective of the scientists.

Phoenix wrote as Maria Tharp, a female scientist born in 1920. Here is an excerpt:

I am Maria Tharp.

I wonder if the ocean floor is really flat.

I see girl scientists being neglected.

I want girl scientists to be excepted [sic] and respected.

I am Maria Tharp.

I pretend the ocean floor is rugged and bumpy.

I feel rejected because I was not allowed to board a research vessel that was going to cross the sea when all the men did.

I touch the maps that I create.

I worry that my theory of the ocean floor is incorrect.

I cry because girls are not being able to become great scientists even if they are smart.

I am a mapmaker of the ocean floor.

From this student's poem, it is evident that she not only learned what Maria Tharp contributed to society but also recognized the struggles Dr. Tharp endured at that time in order to make those contributions, something this young reader may have missed if she had written from the perspective of a young woman living in 2016.

Choice, Creativity, Comprehension

In addition to encouraging, and training, readers to read and interpret from multiple perspectives, I Am poetry can be used as an after-reading response strategy for readers to take themselves back to the text multiple times, comprehending at a deeper level as they analyze to synthesize and manipulate text. In that way readers actually learn material.

And because writing I Am poems allows for choice, creativity, and fun, more students are engaged, the point of any academic activity.

Lesley Roessing, a middle level ELA-humanities teacher for over 20 years, is a senior lecturer in the College of Education at Armstrong State University, director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project, and editor of Connections, the journal of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. The ideas for this article were taken from strategies included in her book, The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension.

Published in AMLE Magazine, August 2016.
Author: Lesley Roessing
Number of views (424)/Comments (0)/
Literature Circles: Student-Driven Instruction

Literature Circles: Student-Driven Instruction

Literature circles bring reading to life for these sixth graders.

What did we just read?

I am so bored!

Why are we reading this?

What's the point?

Sound familiar? These were some of the responses to reading that I received during my first year teaching bright and talented sixth graders.

How could 24 students, who for the most part liked reading, have those attitudes? It had to be the way I taught. How could I engage all 24 students?

I needed a reading instruction strategy that engaged the students and held them accountable. Literature circles seemed to fit the bill. Literature circles keep students accountable within their group, incorporate discussions about what they read at each meeting, and provide a choice that will keep them interested and invested.

When I decided to implement literature circles I kept five things in mind: (1) students get a choice in what they read, (2) teacher models literature circles to the class, (3) students remain accountable due to roles assigned within the group, (4) students have discussions about what they read and complete journal entries, and (5) students have a final project by which the teacher can assess comprehension and understanding.

1. Giving students a choice.

I asked my students what types of books they were interested in reading. I had an idea, but wanted to show them that they had a voice in their learning and had a choice of what to read.

After discussing the types of books the students were interested in, which included dystopia/utopia novels, I began to research new and forthcoming novels that my students had not read and that seemed interesting to their age group.

I presented a list of books to our librarian.Not only was she enthusiastic about finding the books on my list, she gave me other options from schools around the district. We came up with the following books based in part on being able to have enough copies for the students in my class:

  • Barcode Tattoo by Suzanne Weyn
  • The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
  • People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau
  • Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix
  • Life as we Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer
  • Enclave by Ann Aguirre

I presented the titles and authors as a book talk and asked the students to rank the books in order from those they most wanted to read to least favorite or already read. Based on the results of the survey, students were assigned to their literature circle group.

2. Modeling the literature circle.

To help students understand the basics of book discussions I modeled the roles within a literature circle by reading a picture book to the class and then leading a discussion about the book using a fishbowl strategy.

In a fishbowl strategy, a small group of students are in the middle of a circle discussing the book while the majority of the class members are listening from outside the circle.

I followed the demonstration with a video of a literature circle. As a class, we talked about the positive and negative aspects of the literature circle discussion presented on the video and how they could improve it.

Now that the students understood how the discussion should work in a literature circle, I modeled the roles of connector, discussion director, summarizer, literary luminary, and illustrator which the students would rotate through during each meeting.

3. Holding students accountable.

Students each received a schedule indicating which roles they were to play each day. Having assigned roles made the students not only accountable to read the assignment, but also helped them prepare for discussions within their group.

Students had 15 days to read their book front to back and were responsible for calculating how many pages they had to read each day to complete the novel in the time allowed. Role sheets helped prompt discussions at the beginning, but toward the end of their literature circle, students were having open discussions about what they had read and did not need their role sheet for guidance.

4. Discussing and journaling.

Before each literature circle meeting, students spent 10–15 minutes in their small groups discussing what they had read and asking questions before jumping into their book. Every student had a voice and was accountable to discuss within the group.

Students made journal entries five times during those 15 days, writing about the characters, setting, plot, problems, and resolutions. Across the five journal entries, all students increased their higher-order thinking skills. They credited the discussions with helping them understand what they had read and their ability to write about it.

5. Assessing reading comprehension.

At the end of the 15 days, students completed two final projects based on their novel.

One project was a tic-tac-toe board where students completed three small projects relating to character, setting, and plot. Students had a choice of activities such as write a newspaper, create a wanted poster, write a skit, write a song, or develop a sketchbook with captions.

Given choices, students were invested in the project and had a voice in their learning. They had the motivation to complete their projects and were enthusiastic about presenting them to the class.

For the second project, students created their own society and tried to persuade their classmates to be part of it. Since these students were reading utopia/dystopia novels, the society project fit nicely. They could implement what they knew about societies and incorporate the information they gained from their novel, including social studies, technology, math, reading, and science. Students had the option of working independently or in pairs.

To "recruit" their classmates, students prepared a Google slideshow to present to their peers. Students' slides addressed all elements of a society, including money, government, family, education, recreation, and transportation. Students developed the presentations using Google Classroom, which made it possible for me to see their progress as they added slides.

Above and Beyond

Literature circles not only improved my students' reading comprehension, they also increased their love for reading and their motivation to read.

During the 15 days we spent with literature circles, every group finished the assigned book and three finished their assigned book plus the next one in the series. One group not only finished their assigned novel, The Uglies, but they finished the whole series! I didn't suggest that they read the whole series; I simply told the class to have their novel read front to back in 15 days. They enthusiastically read not one, not two, but four novels in 15 days!

With literature circles, the students take control and the learning is driven by the students, for the students. The teacher takes on the role of facilitator—and isn't that what we really want?

Samantha Schnoor is a fifth grade teacher at Century Elementary School in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Published in AMLE Magazine, August 2016.
Author: Samantha Schnoor
Number of views (1155)/Comments (0)/
Making a Middle School Magazine

Making a Middle School Magazine

A student-produced magazine celebrates middle level student voice.

In October 2015, a team of seven editors—all eighth grade boys at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia—met during lunch to compare two digital publishing platforms. They judged entries for the Cover Art Contest and debated the potential of QR codes.

By mid-November, a staff of 36 students released the fall edition of PaperBoy, a 58-page magazine focused on student culture. Within a month, the digital magazine had been read by 700 viewers in the United States, plus a dozen viewers globally, including several from Australia, Thailand, and the UK.

Why a Middle School Magazine?

Authentic writing experiences have been credited with motivating students to compose their best work. Nancie Atwell's In The Middle, along with her subsequent publications, have validated the importance of empowering student voices. Writing for a publication allows students to explore a choice topic, serve as an "expert in residence," and build social connections with peers who share common interests.

Students write in an authentic way, collaborate meaningfully, and often strengthen their personal identity. Nate reviews classic movies, Brett writes humorous pieces, Lane views video games with an intellectual lens. Voices emerge with increased confidence when students have the safety net of a team initiative.

Although a school newspaper offers those same features, a magazine offers many more and varied advantages for young adolescents. Consider that if each student is given a page for free expression, that student has complete ownership of the space. Some may choose to tell their story with images, simply select a suitable background color, or designate fonts to customize the appearance of their pages.

And, there's plenty of room for partnerships: a student writer can pair with a friend who is a page designer. A savvy mathematician can collect survey data and analyze it with a peer journalist who translates findings into narrative form.

A "newspaper column publication" requires time-consuming page formatting to ensure consistency, yet each magazine page is formatted independently. Cohesion is achieved by shuffling pages into a reader-friendly sequence.

Starting Small

Paper Boy wasn't always this big or this popular. Five years ago a staff of seven boys worked the entire school year to produce a 20-page publication (

Our first edition was a recap of an event we call Activities Day. During this biannual event, all students sign up for an extracurricular field trip or focused project that runs for half of a school day.

For our first edition, our student reporters each chose a different activity, carried old-school digital card cameras, and wrote a short synopsis of their chosen activity. They loaded their content into Glogster Edu pages and hyperlinked the pages together. The first edition went live online.

The next year, three boys who were already contributing to a library-inspired book blog were invited to try something new: input their book reviews into a Glogster page and add some images. What would they think about publishing with the PaperBoy staff?

Not only did they accept the invitation, they harnessed animation tools to create Harry Potter-like moving-news images. By pairing Activities Day articles with reviews, PaperBoy increased its readership. Merging these two small groups also helped cultivate new friendships and generate more recognition within our school.

In addition to releasing the magazine digitally, we printed each page (about 12–15 pages at that time) and hung them on a hallway bulletin board with the URL address printed in large type. "Visit"

Students gathered around the display to note who was caught by the camera, to chat about Activities Day, or to point out books they had read.

Recruiting Writers

We were able to quickly recruit book reviewers and serious writers, but staff growth exploded when we asked, "Would anyone be interested in writing movie and video game reviews?"

We initiated a policy that limited reviewing games to those rated for teens or younger audiences; movie reviews covered those marketed as PG-13 or younger. Other popular features now include technology reviews, top ten lists, student survey results (favorite products, music, or hobbies), and teacher interviews. Offering a menu of categories can spark student interest, but individuals always feel free to propose original story ideas.

This is not a club and there are no cuts. Students "join" the staff by submitting artwork, a creative story, a feature story, or a review.

Platforms for Publishing

Students need a canvas on which they can work. Any digital word document can serve this purpose. If you select a specialized publishing platform, first ensure that it complies with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ( Then, check end-user agreements and subscription costs.

We started with Glogster Edu (, which offers a multitude of design options, but requires a subscription for a "class account" where multiple students can create. The class account is key for its faculty-editing privileges.

This year, many students opted to work with Lucidpress ( Our director of academic technology, Hiram Cuevas, added Lucidpress to our Google School account as part of our suite of apps. In addition to being free, Lucidpress allows us to share pages with digital collaborators. We collate our finished pages into a singular pdf document and upload them to Issuu requires a subscription, but it is far less expensive than printing paper copies and allows student work to be shared in the digital domain.

Journalism 101

We do not offer a journalism class. We do, however, ask writers to model best practices. Reviewers are required to read professional reviews on Amazon or video game websites. Feature story writers are reminded to cover the 5Ws and 1H (who, what, when where, why, and how). All interview questions and student surveys are submitted to the faculty advisor before they are sent to their target audience.

We publish what students write as long as it is appropriate for our middle school community and respectful of the values and ideas of others. If the story needs extra work and doesn't make it in the upcoming edition, editors help the students revise it so it can be published in the future.

With regard to reviews, if a student dislikes a product, he is welcome to share his views in an objective way based on details. He may be asked to balance his perspective by citing a few strengths or by sharing a marketing quote from a vendor.

When we started the magazine, our school had two computer labs that housed a total of 30 desktops. We are now a 1:1 school, which has been an asset. If your school isn't there yet, allot more time for students to complete their pages.

Magazine Mechanics

How does our process work for staff members? A "draft deadline" is set for each edition, and a Google Document is established for story proposals. Students sign up digitally to request a story and/or to complete a page design. Drafts are submitted to the faculty advisor and a section editor via Google Drive. Feedback is returned within a week so students can make revisions and resubmit by the following week. At that time, page design begins.

Students search for copyright-free images and record all image links for the advisor to check. Text is pasted into the designed page and then shared with the advisor and editors for final review. Study halls and lunch periods have provided ample time for team communication and collaboration. If a one-to-one writing workshop is needed, a student can meet with the advisor or an editor during recess.

To celebrate the release of each edition, all contributors are invited to the library for a pizza party during lunch. We've never asked English teachers to give extra credit to staff. I do share the publication directly with teachers and parents to ensure that students' efforts are recognized.

You can see our fall 2015 edition at

A Match with Middle School Culture

Launching a student publication presents challenges, but those very challenges empower student growth. With flexibility and creativity, the entire staff develops problem-solving skills to meet team goals.

From the start, we have been able to offer a meaningful realm for adolescent development. Ownership, leadership, peer relationships, and collaboration skills are all cultivated in authentic ways. Digital citizenship, writing skills, and technological savvy are embraced purposefully.

If you want to engage students in active literacy and celebrate middle school voices, a magazine may be the perfect match.

Lisa Brennan is the middle school librarian at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia.

Published in AMLE Magazine, May 2016.
Freewriting Middle Grades Math

Freewriting Middle Grades Math

Incorporating writing into math helps students understand their thinking.

If you'd asked me not too long ago about the challenges of teaching pre-algebra to adolescents, I would have talked about procedural questions such as "What is the square root of 121?" or "What is the formula for volume of a sphere?" Today my response is very different because what counts as math in the middle grades is also shaped by notions of academic language within and across content areas.

Beyond the Numbers

More than strictly procedural fluency and factual recall, students today solve language-rich, complex, real-world application problems. For example, a problem from a unit on the laws of exponents today might read something like: "A shipping box is in the shape of a cube. Each side measures 3c^2d^2 inches. Express the volume of the cube as a monomial."

In short, adolescent learners need to not only know the exponent laws, they also need to apply prior knowledge about volume as they interpret and process a multi-step word problem.

Finally, and perhaps at the center of CCSS math reform, learners need to articulate on paper the thinking behind their solutions—step by step. Common Core math pushes students to think deeply and apply what they know and what they are learning. Freewriting on paper can help take adolescent learners there.

Sometimes students reject writing when it comes to solving mathematical problems. However, exploratory writing—thinking aloud on paper—can provide access to higher-level questions, word problems. Or, to paraphrase a quote by British novelist E. M. Forester, "I'll know what I am thinking when I see what I say." Discipline-specific exploratory writing allows problem solvers to tease out their reasoning and work behind each step of a solution with words.

Stop and Jot

One technique that I use is called "Stop and Jot." The Stop and Jot strategy is a brief moment when everybody pauses and writes about what we've been learning. I tell my students that they don't need to worry about correct grammar, spelling, or punctuation—they simply need to write their thoughts about the day's math activities: what they understood or what they are still trying to figure out. The idea is for students to see what they and their classmates are thinking.

For example, when a September lesson centered on the laws of exponents, the Stop and Jot prompt went like this: "Describe what law of exponents would help solve this problem. What do you already know about this question?"

To guide them, I provide the following instructions: "Write between 3–5 sentences about the day's problems. You can write about your understanding or you can extend a problem. You can write a question you have or you can explain how you solved the problem. Write silently and independently. We'll share our thinking on paper with desk mates."

Here's what three students wrote about the shipping box container:

  1. "The question is asking me to multiply, so I use power to a power law."
  2. "I know it is multiplication because in the volume formula you multiply; I know the volume of that shape is length x width x height."
  3. "I am not sure how to write the exponent law using those numbers."

Talking About Math

The great thing about Stop and Jot is that we can choose to freewrite as often or as little as we need. Students only need a journal, a pen or pencil, and a quiet place where they can write and then share with peers. Having my math students see what they think on paper has made them confident about doing math and talking about math!

Rebecca Stelfox is an eighth grade math teacher at Northeast Middle School in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Published in AMLE Magazine, April 2016.
Author: Rebecca Stelfox
Number of views (1473)/Comments (0)/
Humanities in  a STEM World

Humanities in a STEM World

Engler pointed out the United States' reliance on more qualified workers to fill the increased number of jobs in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, or STEM. "We need STEM-related talent to compete globally, and we will need even more in the future. It is not a matter of choice: For the United States to remain the global innovation leader, we must make the most of all of the potential STEM talent this country has to offer," Engler said.

While students are being encouraged to explore the STEM field, it would be unfortunate if the humanities fields and skills were deemed to be less important. It is precisely skills like effective written and oral communication, written expression, and interpersonal skills that can make a qualified STEM candidate stand out from the crowd.

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration report, STEM: Good Jobs Now and for the Future, STEM jobs are projected to grow at a rate of 18% from 2008 to 2018, compared to 9.8% for non-STEM occupations. The job force needs prepared college graduates to fill these jobs, and candidates' communication, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills they learned in the humanities are

more vital than ever.

For example, in a LinkedIn job posting for a senior software engineer search algorithms and data analytics position at The Home Depot, the first skills listed are "strong interpersonal skills, written and verbal communication" and "strong decision-making, problem-solving skills, critical thinking, and testing skills." Clearly, even the most technical STEM jobs require verbal and written communication skills.

STEM and Beyond

Holcomb Bridge Middle School in Alpharetta, Georgia, operates a STEM Academy as a "school within a school" model. Teachers and administrators select students with high science and math scores and place them in a cohort for integrated science, math, and engineering classes. Students participate in a science fair, hear guest speakers from STEM professions, and complete a STEM portfolio with artifacts from their three STEM classes.

The STEM Academy gives high-achieving students with an interest in math and science a great place to grow their talents and gain experience in these high- demand areas.

Beyond the STEM Academy, to prepare all students to be effective communicators, the humanities department at Holcomb Bridge promotes the continuous development of our readers and writers. This year, our language arts and reading classes focused heavily on reading and analyzing technical documents. Teachers challenged students to read and use data from technical documents in their writing in order to better understand the often-difficult nonfiction texts.

Our school also implemented a writing portfolio. Students save one example of persuasive, narrative, and expository writing from throughout the year, along with the prewriting and preliminary drafts.

The portfolio travels with them from sixth to eighth grade and serves as an artifact of writing improvement for high school admissions. Students have the chance to reflect on their improvement throughout the year, as well as throughout their middle school career.

To encourage our students' love of reading, the humanities department created a monthly book club. Teachers in all the humanities content areas (reading, English language arts, world language, and social studies) volunteer to sponsor a book club session once a month.

Teachers choose books that are high interest and do not necessarily apply to the curriculum. Students are more interested and involved when they are given the chance to work with students from different grade levels and share their thoughts on the complex plots and themes.

Finally, the eighth grade language arts teachers started a program they call Literacy 4 Life. Students follow "Lacey," a cartoon girl posted on the classroom wall, through her life, using literacy skills to navigate complicated documents. Students scour documents such as the Georgia Driver's Manual, a college application, and job applications. They learn the importance of being able to apply an understanding of nonfiction documents in real-life situations.

Many of our students speak English as a second language; some of their parents do not speak English at all. As such, they often are challenged to read and interpret nonfiction texts for their families. As young adolescents, they are tasked with reading, interpreting, and sometimes writing for their parents.

Understanding student and family needs makes the Literacy 4 Life initiative even more applicable and important.

Maintaining Importance

English language arts, reading, and social studies teachers: have no fear for your future in education. Although technology is rising in importance and the STEM areas are gaining in popularity, there will always be a place for the humanities.

Students still need to learn history. They need to know how to communicate effectively and they must learn strategies for deciphering difficult nonfiction texts. That is where English language arts, reading, social studies, and foreign language come in.

The humanities give students a foundation on which to attach new information and build a deeper level of knowledge.

Brittany Durkin is an eighth grade reading and language arts teacher and humanities department chair at Holcomb Bridge Middle School in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Published in AMLE Magazine, April 2016.
Author: Brittany Durkin
Number of views (2164)/Comments (0)/
Encouraging Student Voice Through Writing

Encouraging Student Voice Through Writing

These simple strategies put students' voice in their writing.

Some students come to class ready to engage and offer their voice, but others wish to go unnoticed and remain silent observers to the educational scene. The following is an assortment of creative writing, image writing, and cross-curricular writing ideas that may encourage young adolescents to become actively involved in their learning.

Creative Writing

To encourage freedom in narrative and deeper thinking, involve students in a What If writing activity. This strategy lends itself to a variety of texts; the example here involves pairing the strategy with the Jack London story "Up the Slide," found in many middle grades textbooks.

In "Up the Slide," the protagonist must overcome several man-versus-nature struggles. Teachers may ask students to imagine the story in an alternative setting and to reapply the narrative and protagonist to a new set of struggles revolving around nature or another type of conflict. Students may also rewrite the narrative from a first-person or third-person point of view, addressing the Common Core point of view standards.

An Open-Ended Narrative activity provides part of a story, then asks students to complete it—like a choose-your-own-adventure story. This open-ended strategy can be applied to other writing genres, such as explanatory or argumentative writing. In that case, teachers provide portions of an already-created brainstorm web, essay outline, or a roughly drafted essay and ask students to use these elements to create a more fully developed writing product.

For the Genre Optional strategy, teachers create a list of writing styles, such as poems, memos, and digital texts, and ask students to reach objectives through the chosen genre. For example, students may use a digital text or poem to teach three to five vocabulary terms related to algebraic equations. Or, they may create a memo to demonstrate their understanding of a scientific process or historical event.

Image Writing

With Single-Image Writing, teachers select an image of a character or setting and ask students to infer to describe or respond to the image. These descriptions and responses can take the shape of a character web, a dialogue, or a paragraph structure.

Multiple-Image Writing requires students to use their cognitive skills to connect images. These images can revolve around an already-identified theme, or teachers can help students construct a narrative or expository response to the image set.

Created-Image Writing requires students to visualize aspects of a single character or story element or create an extensive storyboard design based on the events of a longer text. This storyboard design can emphasize discrete language concepts, or it can be used to demonstrate the overall structure of a typical plot, requiring students to identify and explain which panels in the storyboard relate to the exposition, resolution, and other segments of the plot.

Expanding Writing

When technology tools are available, students can create Informational Websites using digital tools like Blogspot ( or Weebly ( Teachers can model this strategy using their own informational websites.

Reading and Responding to a variety of texts across the curriculum is also important. The more students explore a variety of texts, the better prepared they will be for standardized assessments.

Some students are eager to share their thoughts in the classroom; others lack the confidence, interest, or even skill-set to immediately dive into the world of language. These strategies may give them their voice.
Jason D. DeHart, an eighth grade English teacher, is also a student in the Department of Theory and Practice in Teacher Education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Published in AMLE Magazine, March 2016.
Author: Jason D. Dehart
Number of views (1708)/Comments (0)/
Tags: Writing
Reaching the  Reluctant Reader

Reaching the Reluctant Reader

Turning negative perceptions into positive outlooks.

Common Core State Standards require that students read at complex levels. Guiding students through these increasingly complex materials can be daunting for teachers of mixed ability students, special education students, English Language Learners, and students considered to be Level 1 and Level 2 readers.

Some students do not have the same ability as their classmates; other students lack the motivation needed to read complex texts. Still others are hampered by negative attitudes toward reading.

Among the several strategies teachers can use to motivate reluctant readers is keeping a growth mindset at the forefront of their thinking.

Reading Perceptions

Carol Dweck's work on growth mindset is described in her book, Mindset. Dweck describes the growth mindset as the belief that regardless of talents, aptitudes, interests, or temperaments, "everyone can change and grow through application and experience."

Students must be explicitly taught how to embrace this mindset in the content areas. Unless they have fully embraced the growth mindset, they are vulnerable to academic and social stagnation , or worse, their abilities may decline in these areas.

By the time students reach middle school , the enjoyment of reading, or lack thereof, has been instilled. As their minds become full of technology and social media, and academic expectations grow more complex, we must teach them how to approach reading in a positive way. Tackling a lackluster attitude may be enough to light the fire and give adolescents at least some desire to engage with the reading materials in each class.

Each student is unique and has a different approach to reading. Teachers can begin to adjust their instruction to emphasize positive viewpoints on reading. Overemphasizing the difficulty of the text may shut down apprehensive readers. Instead, teachers might say a text is challenging, but then explain ways the class is going to strategize to understand the text.

Rather than saying, "This is a really difficult text, so we need to pay attention to understand it," try saying, "This text is a challenging text, but we are going to look at different strategies to help us understand the content. These strategies will help us understand this text and make it easier to read other texts later this year because we all will know how to apply these strategies effectively."

The latter statement helps students see how they can be successful. The language is more positive, which transfers to a positive classroom environment.

Another way to address students' negative attitude toward reading is to refuse to allow it to permeate the classroom environment. When students make statements such as, "I don't like reading" or "Reading is boring" or "I'm not good at reading," teachers can introduce positive statements that help students see value in what they are reading:

"It's okay not to like everything that you have read. Today, however, I would like us to think about how this text can help us understand the world. This will allow us to see why our textbook might have included this selection and help us locate other texts that may answer questions we have about the content of what we are reading."

This generic statement can be modified for a specific text or content, but it may change a negative comment into a yearning for knowledge statement. Relating the text to something in an adolescent's world helps alter his or her mindset and delivers a sense of intrigue about a topic.

Some texts in a prescribed curriculum may not relate to adolescents. If teachers take time to find additional text, related to first text or as an alternate text that appeals to the interests of students in their classroom, a reading resister may be more likely to engage with the content.

Appealing to the interests of students is key to creating an equitable classroom as teachers form positive relationships with students and get to know them as individuals. This is also a way teachers can differentiate for the needs in the classroom. However, appealing to the interests alone may not be enough to engage students who resist reading.

Low-Skill Readers

A fixed mindset is the opposite of a growth mindset. In a fixed mindset, students believe they have only what Dweck describes as a "certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character." Once this mindset takes root in a student's mind, it is difficult to shake. When a student determines he or she has failed at something, this belief tends to stick and the "I am not good at reading" and "I dislike reading" comments become reality statements rather than avoidance techniques.

The belief of not being good at reading typically takes root in third or fourth grade and is particularly problematic at the middle school level. By the time students reach seventh or eighth grade, this mindset is creating a foundation that is academically dismal.

However, challenging the adolescent fixed mindset regarding reading gives students the opportunity to change from taking a defeatist approach to learning to embrace the tools needed to be successful in the future. To address this mindset, educators must first recognize it exists. They also must believe a student is capable of reading complex material at the appropriate grade level.

It's important to recognize that a fixed mindset will not change immediately. It takes persistence and patience to work with a student who has a "failure" response to reading. Providing students with adequate feedback can help them adjust their thinking patterns. It takes work to provide positive feedback, but it will pay off.

Teachers can follow a simple formula to provide effective feedback: Area Addressed + Present Behavior + Future Implication. This formula can be adapted to any situation for any student. Before giving this type of feedback, the teacher must understand the root of the problem.

For example, let's say a student is struggling to comprehend a particular text. The teacher may say, "It seems that you are having some trouble identifying the main idea of this text. I notice that when you read, you are skimming through one section and then moving on to another section. Try slowing down and when you come to the end of a section, identify any words or phrases that you may not know. I can help you understand these terms. If you continue to use this strategy, you will begin to answer some of these questions on your own and texts similar to this one will become easier to understand later in the semester."

A teacher using the feedback formula might say, "I hear you say you are not good at reading. When we read in class, you seem to be able to follow along and you ask some great questions about the characters. Sometimes you don't know all the answers to these questions, and I think that is what is troubling you. When you can't find an answer, try re-reading the text. If you still don't know the answer after you have read the text, continue reading. The answer may come later in the text. If you become confused, let me know. Together, we can find these answers. When you are able to find these answers, and if you continue to question characters, you will be better prepared for the narrative we will be writing in our next unit."

Closing Thoughts

There are many reasons students enter our classrooms as reluctant readers. Initially, addressing these readers can be taxing; however, with the appropriate tools, educators can begin to change the mindset of resistant reader.

John Helgeson has taught middle school students for 17 years. He is currently the Secondary English Instructional Specialist in the Northshore School District in Bothell, Washington.

Published in AMLE Magazine, March 2016.
Author: John Helgeson
Number of views (1971)/Comments (0)/
Necessary Noise: The Importance of Collaborative Learning

Necessary Noise: The Importance of Collaborative Learning

An old-fashioned radio broadcast encourages deeper reading.

Connections between students, connections between texts and students, and connections between texts and the real world are vital to student learning. In classrooms, one way to make connections is by linking people, ideas, behaviors, and activities through projects.

My first experience teaching in a classroom was when I substituted for 10 days for a foreign language teacher who taught one English class: a ninth grade basic reading class. She was assigned this class because there were not enough language classes to fill her roster and, frankly, no one else wanted these students. This was a class of "reluctant readers."

The students were supposed to be reading Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Most of Ray Bradbury's works would have been an appropriate choice for this class, but Dandelion Wine was based on his childhood summer with his grandfather in a small American town in 1928.

This was 1988, and the remedial English class was comprised primarily of 15-year-old urban males. Nothing could have been further from their reality.

After a few minutes with the students, even I, brand-new and idealistic as I was, could tell they had no intention of reading the novel. In front of me were the endless lists of vocabulary words, end-of-chapter "discussion" questions, and quizzes I was pretty sure they all would fail—and they wouldn't care.

I had to find a way to interest them in the book—something social, something active, something that would entice them to read the book and engage them in academic discussions about characters, setting, plot elements, theme, diction, and author's purpose.

On the Air

I cleared my throat and announced: "We are going to turn this book into a radio news show."

Now I had their attention. We discussed the components of a 30-minute news show: lead stories, local news, human interest or feature stories (the "kicker"), sports, the economy, lifestyle stories, weather, and commercials. Then, for the next few days, we partitioned the class into two parts: (1) learning about the structure and content of each type of news story, reading newspapers, and listening to broadcasts as "mentor texts"; and (2) reading the novel and looking for the news stories within.

Readers now had a purpose for reading. Even though they did not personally connect to the characters and events in the novel, they had a purpose for learning about them: to report on them. This novel became more of a window than a mirror.

Each day I gave a 15-minute focus-lesson during which we listened to a clip of a radio news show or read a newspaper column as our "mentor texts." Sometimes we had a mini-lesson on research and reading for details, since they were conducting some light research on the time period.

During the 45-minute workshop time (although this was long before I had heard of reading-writing workshop), students individually caught up with their reading and used sticky notes to jot ideas for news segments.

The students divided themselves into broadcast groups, each planning its specific part of the radio show. Within their groups, they flipped back and forth through the pages of the novel, reading and re-reading; questioning and explaining and arguing over events and dialogue; analyzing details and events and setting.

They searched for newsworthy events, wrote scripts, and played with word choice. They created jingles and ads to advertise dandelion wine and dandelion wine recipe books, green apple pie, and sneakers. They drafted summer weather reports and human interest stories based on events and characters from 1928.

During the development of the program segments, I continued 15-minute focus lessons on skills such as reading for—and writing to include—details, leads, script writing, interviewing or persuasive advertising techniques, which they would be able to apply to reading, writing, and speaking during the year.

The classroom was abuzz with laughter and singing. Students were reading the novel, local newspapers, and research articles and primary sources about the time period of the book—all at an adolescent decibel. Absenteeism was at an all-time low.

Radio Show Day

Radio Show Day arrived. All the students had read most, if not all, of Dandelion Wine, drafted and practiced their scripts, and arrived prepared to perform. The class was loud, boisterous, committed. When I looked around, I saw boys perched on desks arranged in a circle, rather than in neat rows. It was their newscast, and they were ready to go.

The students put on a wonderful news show for each other, filled with facts and creative commercials and easily filled a half hour with content based on the book and the time period. However, it wasn't the quality—or quantity—of the product that mattered; it was the quality of the process—the reading, analyzing, and synthesizing of information read and application to "real" situations. It also was the quality of the learning community that was built during those two weeks.

Since I was not the teacher of record, I left copious notes for their regular teacher and gave the students feedback on their preparation, content, and delivery. If I were assessing the project, I would make sure that each student was responsible for researching, writing, and presenting a part of his group segment and would have given the students a content and delivery rubric in advance.

As far as reading and comprehending the book, all students demonstrated that they read all or most (or at least more than previously) and were able to analyze and apply what they learned from the book and the informational multimedia texts they "researched" in their synthesis. I must say, they successfully climbed Bloom's Taxonomy of Thinking, which is what teachers hope for in any classroom lesson.

Reading, Writing, and Collaboration

After 27 years of a lot of reading, research, and writing about best practices in teaching and literacy and engagement strategies, as well as studying male literacy, I can look back and truly analyze the success of the radio news project. It was based on purposeful reading, writing, and speaking in a collaborative workshop format. This single project encompassed at least a dozen best practices:

  • Writing (in narrative, informative, and persuasive modes) for authentic purpose and audience and making reading-writing connections
  • Talking (and singing) and listening that is on-task, purposeful, and academic
  • Reader response, or writing to learn, as readers talk and write about what they read
  • Synthesis of text, taking students back to the book to re-read for deeper meaning and learning
  • Active, experiential, project-based learning
  • Use of supplemental mentor and research materials (newspapers, newscasts, and primary sources) to support learning
  • Higher-order thinking, such as analysis, application, and synthesis
  • Student responsibility, choice, and, therefore, engagement
  • Democratic principles (students decide what, how, and why)
  • Differentiation and individualization; valuation of different strengths and talents
  • Multiple intelligences
  • Interdisciplinary approach to teaching. Even though the project took place within English class, students studied and incorporated elements of history, science, and math. For example, students used math to figure out the timing of the newscast segments, to analyze the percentage of the newscast devoted to different topics, and to perform statistical analyses for their advertisements.

The most apparent best practice was collaboration. As Kathryn Wentzel says in her contributed chapter to The Handbook of Competence and Motivation, "When teachers support [the] need for collaboration by allowing students to share ideas and build knowledge together, a sense of belongingness to the classroom community is established and the extension and elaboration of existing knowledge is facilitated."

This or similar reading-writing-speaking-listening projects that combine independence with interdependence and collaboration can be used in each content area or across the team as an interdisciplinary unit, incorporating all content areas.

Lessons Learned

Twenty-seven years ago I may not have been able to articulate my rationale in academic terms based on the research of others. But I would have been able to explain why collaboration and noise were necessary to the learning of these adolescents.

Helping Administrators Understand

Recently, I worked with administrators who wanted to know what they should be looking for in a class in any discipline to determine whether reading and writing are being effectively taught. Many of the "look-fors" I suggested were not what they expected to hear—especially those administrators who value quiet students, rows of desks, pacing guides and scripted lessons, and everyone on the same page at the same time.

Some key general look-fors in any content area classroom might be:

  • Direct instruction moving toward release of responsibility with teacher as facilitator.
  • An expressed purpose for reading.
  • Lessons that connect reading and writing standards.
  • A classroom arrangement that is conducive to the particular instruction or lesson.
  • All students actively engaged on task.
  • Talk that is on-task, purposeful, and academic.
  • True differentiation based on students' needs and strengths, not merely teaching a lesson at different "levels"

However, observing these elements is not enough. To determine effective reading and writing instruction, administrators might ask students questions to determine if they understand what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what they are learning. Administrators might ask teachers to explain what they are doing and what the rationale, objectives, and goals of the lesson are, and initiate a critical self-reflection on their own teaching practices.

Administrators might ask teachers:

  • What am I observing?
  • What teaching methods are you using and what are your objectives and goals? What outcomes are you seeing from this teaching method?
  • What literacy/comprehension strategies are you teaching? Why? On what research or readings do you base this teaching/lesson?
  • How are you delivering this instruction? Why? On what research or readings do you base this method of teaching this lesson?
  • How can you determine on what level your students comprehend the material? How are they responding to text?
  • How are you supporting the reading of text that may be too challenging for or uninteresting to students? How can your students apply it to other text or lessons?
  • What changes have you observed in your readers and their reading? How have you observed these changes?
—Lesley Roessing

Lesley Roessing is senior lecturer in the College of Education and director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project, Armstrong State University, Savannah, Georgia. She is editor of Connections, the GCTE journal and author of several books and articles. The strategies in this article were incorporated in additional projects, in a variety of content areas, included in No More "Us" and "Them": Classroom Lessons & Activities to Promote Peer Respect (Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

Published in AMLE Magazine, February 2016.
Preventing Plagiarism: Three Proactive Paraphrasing Lessons

Preventing Plagiarism: Three Proactive Paraphrasing Lessons

You've read it … that one passage in a student research paper that startles you. The sentence structure and vocabulary exceed middle school norms. You raise your eyebrows, shake your head, and take a deep breath. How many times did you say, "Don't copy word for word."

As middle school educators, we're used to saying things more than once; we're also comfortable with learning from mistakes. Middle school plagiarism is often unintentional. Plagiarism prevention, however, needs to be explicitly intentional.

The excerpt below, from, lists six types of plagiarism. Three of them can be avoided when students can confidently paraphrase.

What is plagiarism?
All of the following are considered plagiarism

  • turning in someone else's work as your own
  • copying words or ideas from someone else without giving credit
  • failing to put a quotation in quotation marks
  • giving incorrect information about the source of a quotation

So what can teachers do? Be proactive.

Introduce your students to effective paraphrasing strategies before they begin a research project. Once a research project begins, students need to navigate a number of new routines, platforms, and skills. Short term assignments are replaced by longer term deadlines. Textbooks are temporarily traded for database articles. Bibliographies, website evaluation, and citation styles (which may not have been mentioned for a few months) are suddenly essential again.

The lessons shared below are designed to require minimal class time while targeting concepts middle schoolers need to paraphrase successfully.

Lesson #1 - Introduction: What is Paraphrasing?

Share the three images below and ask students to explain how they might be sequenced into a simple story. After listening to their ideas, introduce the term "paraphrasing" and its definition. Reveal the image captions, and guide students to apply the image "story line" to the concept of paraphrasing. In this way, you're bridging the concrete to the abstract and offering a visual anchor that can be referenced when the research project begins.

Gather information.
Copyright © Encyclopedia Britannica ImageQuest

Assess what you have.
Copyright © Wells Fargo Bank

Create your own work.
Copyright © DwellStudio

Why are image attributions listed under each picture? Three different artists contributed to my illustration of a new message. That's exactly what students will do when research and writing ensues. Each artist (or author) deserves credit for their work. Not citing sources is one type of plagiarism. For a research paper, full citations would be included in a formatted bibliography.

Lesson #2 - Practice Active Reading and Note Taking

Prior to research, class time is always at a minimum. A review of note taking skills, however, can be paired with a regularly scheduled textbook reading as the groundwork for paraphrasing. Selecting key facts is critical to an effective paraphrase. Remind students to ask questions before they read, highlight only valuable keywords (these are "golden"), and apply a note taking strategy such as two-column notes, bullet notes, or an outline. If your students are well versed in these study skills, a homework assignment is likely to offer sufficient practice. If your students aren't familiar with note taking and highlighting strategies, consider inviting your school's literacy coach to lead a lesson.

Lesson #3 - Paraphrasing Dos and Don'ts

After students have practiced highlighting and note taking, devote some time for paraphrasing practice. Modeling paraphrasing from existing notes is ideal. Offering time for students to work in groups as they paraphrase notes can build confidence. Still, some students rely on "rephrasing" strategies that are within the realm of plagiarism.

Sentence level plagiarism frequently occurs when students reverse the structure of the sentence, substitute a synonym, or delete a conjunction to create two sentences. Try this system to support student understanding. Keep a sense of humor. The reminders are intentionally "light hearted," but middle school students are sure to recognize mistakes they've made in the past and to remember these "labels" in the future.

It is not ok to…. Original Sentence Still Plagiarism
"Flip Flop" When the cell is ready to divide, the nuclear membrane dissolves (Mitosis, UXL). The nuclear membrane dissolves when the cell is ready to divide.
"Quick Swap" The chromosomes, are exactly replicated and the two copies distributed to identical daughter nuclei (Mitosis, Columbia) The chromosomes , are duplicated and the two copies are sent to identical daughter nuclei.
"Chop Chop" In animal cells the centrioles separate and move apart, and radiating bundles of fibers, called asters, appear around them (Mitosis, Columbia). In animal cells the centrioles separate and move apart. Radiating bundles of fibers, called asters, appear around them.
see bibliography below

Plagiarism occurs any time an idea or work is borrowed from someone else without giving proper credit. While proactive paraphrasing lessons enable students to approach research writing with increased confidence, a comprehensive understanding of plagiarism and guidelines for its prevention remain part of an ongoing dialogue. The lessons above, designed in response to a History teacher's request, are now reviewed prior to English class research projects as well. Collaboration between departments, grade levels, and librarians can ensure that plagiarism prevention is dovetailed with meaningful student practice.

DwellStudio. Gold Horse Figurine. N.d. DwellStudio. Web. 18 Feb. 2016. <>.

Gold pan full of bullion. N.d. Wells Fargo Bank. Guided By History. Web. 18 Feb. 2016. <>.

"Mitosis." UXL Encyclopedia of Science. Ed. Amy Hackney Blackwell and Elizabeth Manar. 3rd ed. Farmington Hills, MI: UXL, 2015. Research in Context. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.

"Mitosis." The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia™. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Research in Context. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.

Prospector pans for gold. Photography. Encyclopædia Britannica ImageQuest. Web. 14 Feb 2016.

"What Is Plagiarism?" IParadigms, LLC, 2014. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.

Lisa Brennan is a librarian at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia.
Author: Lisa Brennan
Number of views (5506)/Comments (2)/
Tags: Writing

Related Resources

Topic Matter Experts

Bring professional learning to your school. More info...


Music transcription

Dear Colleagues,

I am currently studying on automatic music transcription but need to find research papers other than written in the framework of  Music Information Retrieval.

However, I could not find much resource about manual transcription from the perspectives psychology of music, music education or music theory, etc.

I could only find papers on "notation reading" such as the one written by John Sloboda (in his book, "exploring the musical minds).

I would be grateful if anyone could suggest papers on manual transcription. (I have enough papers on the topic written by ethnomusicologists)

Best regards,


Raisin Bran Muffins

Raisin Bran Muffins

Yield: 12 muffins

Prep Time: 15 minutes (active), 45 minutes (inactive)

Cook Time: 15 to 20 minutes

Total Time: 35 minutes

1½ cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon baking soda
¼ teaspoon salt
1/3 cup granulated sugar
3 tablespoons light brown sugar
2½ cups Raisin Bran cereal
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1¼ cups buttermilk
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line a muffin tin with liners, or spray with non-stick cooking spray.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt and sugars. Stir in the cereal; set aside.

3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the vegetable oil, egg, buttermilk and vanilla extract.

4. Pour the wet ingredients over the dry ingredients, and stir until completely combined. Allow the mixture to sit at room temperature for at least 45 minutes (this allows the cereal to soften in the batter). If you don't want to use immediately, you can refrigerate in an airtight container for up to three days.

5. When ready to bake, divide the batter between the 12 muffin tins. Sprinkle the tops with granulated sugar.

6. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes, or until a thin knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Store in an airtight container at room temperature for up to two days, and then in refrigerator for up to another week.

(Recipe adapted from Joy the Baker)


Christ And The Adulteress (1508-10) Titian

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow

Absurd comparisons can be telling. Try this. "He had just come to the bridge; and not looking where he was going, he tripped over something, and the fir-cone jerked out of his paw into the river.

"'Bother,' said Pooh, as it floated under the bridge, and he went to get another fir-cone. But then he thought he would just look at the river instead, because it was a peaceful sort of day, so he lay down and looked at it, and it slipped away beneath him... and suddenly there was his fir-cone slipping away too.

"'That's funny,' said Pooh. 'I dropped it on the other side'."

This is the origin of Poohsticks. (Sticks soon replace fir-cones.) It's strange that this elemental game should have been created only in the early 20th century. It's not so strange that Pooh's revelation should hold various basic lessons about the mind and the world.

For example, played as a competitive race between two dropped sticks Poohsticks demonstrates the power of delay. You could play the game without a bridge, with only a stream and a marked finish line, and it would work just as well. But the sticks would stay in view all through – and without the element of vanishing, the interval of invisibility, there would be no tension, no waiting, no surprise result.

Played with a solo stick it's equally enlightening. It teaches the continuousness of things, how something that has disappeared can reappear elsewhere. But it also teaches the discontinuousness of things. Something that's expected to appear may not appear when or where it's expected. However much you might try to gauge the speed and direction of your Poohstick, you will fail. It always arrives out of nowhere.

It shouldn't be surprising that Poohsticks has analogies with pictures either. It's a very visual game. It involves things vanishing and appearing, things going behind something else and emerging again. Pictures are made up of things overlapping other things. They're a tissue of hidings and showings. And occasionally something emerges from behind something else with no cue or apparent connection. The "out of nowhere" effect is one of painting's tricks.

The work on this page, Christ and the Adulteress, is a sumptuous Venetian painting with a changeable history. It was once credited to Giorgione. Now it is normally thought to be by Titian. The subject has been disputed too. It looks like Christ and the adulteress, though a few have seen Daniel and Susannah. But, most seriously, the painting has been literally carved up.

A copy by another artist shows what, roughly, it originally looked like. A narrow strip has been cut off across the bottom. More drastically, the whole figure of a standing soldier has been removed from the right side – you can still see the tip of his knee, in blue and white hose, just poking in. Most of this soldier remains lost, but a section with his head and shoulders has turned up, and is in Kelvingrove too. Fortunately no slices have been taken from the top.

The scene, Christian-Venetian, has divided loyalties. It has its figurative drama, a relay of turns and gestures, telling a story of accusation and repentance, rebuke and forgiveness. It is also a surface of rich material delights, a quilting of colours and textures, folds and gleams, whose pleasures seem indifferent to subject matter. The accusing man is just as gorgeously clothed as the accused woman, and Jesus himself hardly less.

But it is one small detail that becomes the emotional and sensational high point of the painting. It isn't directly a part of this human business. It's the background. The only bit of background that – as it stands – the picture has. (The surviving section of the soldier shows that in the original there was also a distant glimpse of the sea at the very right side.) In other words, it's that green grassy knoll, with trees and sheep, that appears above the woman's head.

It appears out of nowhere. We can suppose that somehow this mound of ground is continuous with the green grass verge of the foreground. But there is no visible path between them, nor are the two divided areas near enough to establish a smooth pick-up between them. This foreground disappears behind the group of figures, and so conclusively that when it reappears at the top of the picture, behind their heads, you aren't expecting it. There is a visual delay. It vanishes. It suddenly emerges. Poohsticks.

Other factors intensify this knoll. It provides the picture's maximum contrast between light and shade: the dark edges of building and cap against its bright green. It shows a little idyll of sheep, which have all kinds of significance in Christian parables and classical pastoral. It is a pillow of softness, on which the woman, leaning inward and slightly backwards, seems to be laying her head – a gesture that goes with the rather somnambulistic action of the whole scene, and seems to give her a blessing. But it's the pause, the interval, the effect of delay and sudden appearance, that gives this detail its piercing force.

About the artist

Titian (1485-c1576) recently made a surprising appearance in British politics. The issue came down to how long he had lived. We don't know, is the answer. But in his long life he discovered the full powers of oil painting, using it with unprecedented sumptuousness, tenderness, sexiness – and unprecedented roughness and bleakness. He turned his hand to religious ecstasy and pagan orgies, pampered nudes and meditative portraits, and in old age developed the first "late style" in European art – free and unfinished-looking, barely articulate, "painted more with his fingers than his brushes", as contemporaries said, made of "broad and bold strokes and smudges, so that from nearby nothing can be seen". Perhaps Mr Brown would say the same.


your daily reminder

that taiwan was never meant to be an “east asian” country - it was and still is the homeland of indigenous austronesian tribes that share language roots and ancestry with filipinx and other pacific islander groups. taiwan is colonized land. taiwan is colonized land. stop using “taiwanese people” as synonymous with sino/Han/east asian. taiwan being grouped with china/the rest of east asia is NOT A NATURAL PHENOMENON. it is the result of the near-complete erasure and decimation of taiwanese aboriginal people, cultures, and languages. taiwanese as synonymous with Han ppl and culture only perpetuates a legacy of genocide, colonialism, erasure. if u want to learn more about this: google the Dutch Pacification campaign, spanish imperialism, indigenous resistance to brutal Japanese colonialism, forced sinicization. remember that taiwan was never supposed to be a mandarin-speaking, Chinese/Japanese-influenced, Han-inhabited place.

to all the brown taiwanese ppl deemed savage/lesser in their own country: i see u!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pokemon Go players in Taiwan


Digital Attachments

XCOM sniper (not Dmitrri)It’s tough to lose a solider. Especially one like Dimitri. A fine sniper, with a good kill record. I had trained him for so long, raised him from a lowly private to sergeant, then to lieutenant. He was equipped with the best gear. His accuracy had improved to a deadly asset. He was a cornerstone to my tactical approach.

He was also an investment in time and materiel. And as such, he was headed for greatness. Captain, maybe major.

Until the aliens got him. That was nasty.

Three of them swarmed his position, flanking his protection and taking him down with close melee attacks while the rest of the squad was busy defending citizens, too far to help.

Not a pretty sight.

The same battle took out Matt, the heavy weapons corporal who blasted whole blocks with his rocket launcher. Matt was caught in the blast of an exploding car outside a mall where the aliens had landed. Damn, I hadn’t counted on that when I moved him up to an overwatch position. But the aliens set the car on fire and that was that.

Our assault got caught in an ambush. We won, eventually, but it was a long fight with every inch bitterly contested. Coming back to base we were a solemn group. Two dead. Not a good thing.

Now the squad looks awfully thin, two down with rookies in their place. Big shoes to fill. And it’s not getting any easier out there, with the aliens ramping up their own technology, and getting tougher and smarter all the time. Winning this war won’t be easy. Matt I could almost afford to lose, being relatively new, but Dmitri was my best sniper.

I need to start training someone, fast. But who?

Of course it’s a game (XCOM: Enemy Unknown to be precise). Playing it this week has made me ponder the nature of attachment, in particular our attachment to characters in games or online. Why does it matter to us when a digital character “dies”? Or how he/she “lives”? How do we get so attached to virtual beings?

After all, it’s not like real life or death. Just a game. But yet…

Losing Dmitri irked me, but it also bothered me on a deeper level. Not simply because I had customized him, changed his suit colours, his facial hair, and imagined a background for him. He was mine. Or me. I’m not sure which. There was an emotional link. Not the easiest thing for a person who values logic and skepticism.

When the aliens gutted Dmitri, I was torn between restarting at the last save-game position and playing the deus ex machina role to save him, or letting the narrative run as it played out. Starting again felt like cheating. Letting him die felt like I had failed him. It. Dmitri wasn’t real, of course. But he/it felt like he was, at times. The narrative won, but not without misgivings.

Continue reading “Digital Attachments”

6,294 total views, 20 views today

Narrative and free agency in game design

World of WarcraftAs a former World of Warcraft player, I can attest to how compelling it is to play an immersive, massive, 3D role-playing game. Acting out scenarios in a fantasy world is more involving than merely reading a fantasy novel. You get addicted to being part of the narrative, to swinging the sword instead of just reading about it.

Just as when you’re reading a good novel and can’t stop turning the pages, you keep playing to see how the next chapter/adventure/scenario plays out, especially when you don’t always have to follow the script.

It’s not so much about the gameplay, as much as it is being part of the story. Well-designed games compel you to continue playing through a combination of action, puzzle solving, rewards and group activities.

WOW is an MMO – massive multiplayer online game – set in a fantasy world that draws much of its substance from Tolkein and other fantasy writers. Many of the role-playing games (RPGs) follow the pseudo-Tolkein model, but most follow paths laid out in fantasy literature (i.e. characters and novels by Robert Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft or more modern writers).

WOW is, of course, not the only game that offers that sort of setting, but at eight years old, with about 12 million subscribers, it’s both the largest and longest-lasting of them. It thus becomes the yardstick for measuring any other game in the genre. None of its competitors – Rift, Guild Wars, Lord of the Rings,Star Wars, etc. – have a fraction of the players.

RPGs owe their ancestry to a small box set of rules published in 1976, called Dungeons and Dragons. Written by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson (whose name subsequently disappears from the list of authors in later printings), it essentially created the standards for fantasy role playing that are still in use today.

This is documented in great detail in Jon Peterson’s 700-page tome, Playing at the World (his blog is here). It was reading this book that got me thinking about game design again (and to dig through what few old wargames and rules books I have in the basement…).

In his introduction, Peterson identifies “freedom of agency” as one of the key components, “as much a necessary condition for inclusion in the genre of role-playing games as is role assumption.” The ability to make choices of action, of goal, and behaviour are central to a compelling game. In the Wired interview, linked above, Peterson defends gaming,

Which is similar to what I’ve been writing about for a few decades.* Gaming, at least in the simulation-style games, is not merely a pointless pastime, but rather an intellectual exercise.

Computer games have both redefined entertainment and set the bar for hardware and software development. Games are incredibly demanding of computer resources compared to, say, a spreadsheet. Consider the processing required to keep track of dozens, even hundreds of players who are interacting in 3D space in realtime, plus all of the geography, terrain, in-game trades and purchases, combat, weather and environmental effects. And to keep everyone in the game fully informed of all the events, locations and activities of their characters, pets, party members, resources, movement paths, mail… it’s a stunning amount of work.

Beyond the coding, there are some basic components any game needs to be successful:

  • Clearly defined purpose and goals;
  • Challenge;
  • Identifiable opponents to overcome;
  • Reward for accomplishing goals or overcoming challenges;
  • An understandable and accessible board geography where the game is played;
  • Clear and concise rules.

RPGs add other elements to create that immersive experience, including:

  • Connecting story/narrative;
  • Character choice, advancement and development;
  • Consequences of actions or behaviour;
  • Alternate races (orcs, elves, dwarves, etc.);
  • Role assumption (taking on the persona of a character in the story);
  • Free agency (the ability to move and act independent of the script);
  • Believable fantasy, alternate or futuristic world environment;
  • Clear sides with which the races align and which have competing goals.

Computer games have additional components:

  • Good graphics and visual appeal;
  • Good AI (artificial intelligence) and NPCs (non-player characters);
  • Believable environmental interactions, simulated physics and effects;
  • Appropriate sound (and sometimes music);
  • Interactivity with NPCs, environment;
  • Social activity (in MMOs).

Some RPGs (i.e. Fable, Witcher, Fallout 3), have more complex “consequences” built into decision making within their games. Certain choices – such as attacking or stealing from non-player characters (computer-controlled NPCs) or how you answer their questions – affect the way others relate to your character. How well these mimic actual social or personal behaviour is debatable. Mostly they seem to me merely designed to add chrome to role assumption. In some cases, they don’t really affect the game or quests.

Since these are solo games, rather than MMOs, you can usually save your game before you make a choice, then replay it with a different choice if you don’t like an outcome. That tends to dissipate the suspension of belief necessary for immersion.

I don’t include “fun” in any of these lists because fun, like beauty or taste, is subjective. Players will gravitate to the games that provide the highest entertainment value for their own interests and aptitudes. I, for example, never found WOW’s battlegrounds “fun” but always enjoyed questing and exploring (solo and in parties). Others eschew the quests for the PvP combat in the battlegrounds.

Can the storyline absorb the players sufficiently, for long enough to suspend belief, deeply enough to make you care about both the characters and the action? It depends on how well the narrative is scripted. A good storyline has to be crafted as carefully as a good novel and needs to generate a similar emotional response.

Clearly, however, game narrative is very different from a storyline in a book, since choice is a key element in gaming.

Quests can also be seen as ‘micro-narratives.’ In many games, the plot or story is merely a shell that contains numerous micro-stories presented as quests. Sometimes these are dynamic, so that the nature or goals of quest B depends on how or how well you accomplished quest A. However, the shell story needs to be coherent so players don’t simply feel they’re moving from one mini-game to the next for no reason.

A lot of games fall down with thin stories, pointless quests (collect X eyeballs or Y spleens), and predictable A-to-B-to-C plots. And too many depend more on action to move them along rather than plot or participatory narrative (i.e. Diablo III).

Patrick Holleman, on the Game Design forum, writes,

“…the difference between traditional games and videogames is that videogames have a world in which everything about the game, except for controller input, takes place. This world is created, controlled, and sometimes populated by continuous and discrete artificial intelligence. The player is a guest in that world, the central participant in its mechanics. Even still, the world is usually not driven by the player; it is the designer’s world, and should be studied as such.”

Holleman also asks, “…whether or not videogames are similar enough to traditional narratives that we should study them the same way.” In response, he adds,

“To begin, it makes sense to admit that some portions of videogame narratives are exactly like books; the player reads them without interacting except to turn the ‘page’. Some narrative segments in videogames are exactly like movies; the player watches them without doing anything except pausing and unpausing. No decent videogame is entirely like movies or books. A movie creates a fictional world that one can see and hear, but viewers are locked into a guided tour that the filmmakers have scheduled for the viewer, and viewers can never deviate from that tour. In a videogame, on the other hand, the player is presented with a world that can be accessed largely at their own discretion. Videogames that are too linear—too much like the guided tours of movies—are often deprecated by critics and gamers.”

Interactivity is essential, but is not synonymous with narrative. Ernest Adams, writing in “Three Problems For Interactive Storytellers,” said,

In that same article, Henry Jenkins writes,

“You say narrative to the average gamer and what they are apt to imagine is something on the order of a choose-your-own adventure book, a form noted for its lifelessness and mechanical exposition rather than enthralling entertainment, thematic sophistication, or character complexity… Most often, when we discuss games as stories, we are referring to games that either enable players to perform or witness narrative events – for example, to grab a lightsabre and dispatch Darth Maul in the case of a Star Wars game. Narrative enters such games on two levels – in terms of broadly defined goals or conflicts and on the level of localized incidents. “

Immersiveness also depends heavily on how much free will the player has, and the ability to write ourselves into the script. In games like Diablo III, the action is very linear and with little flexibility for explore or act outside the proscribed plot and territory. These games have little immersive value (and, at least with D3, little replay value, either). Others, like Mass Effect and Dragon Age, combine limited freedom with scripted activities and plots.

Morrowwind, Skyrim and the post-apocalyptic Fallout 3 provide a generally freely roam-able world, and in some cases, the ability to attempt quests well beyond your character’s level (some MMOs offer this, as well).**

While few solo RPG games offer such significant free agency, it is the hallmark of most MMOs. Holleman writes,

“World of Warcraft is another game heavily dependent on the depth and persuasiveness of its world; it has the benefit of being an ever-expanding world as well, with content updates and expansion packs. The first time through the game tends to be the best, from a narrative perspective. The structure of the quests (tasks with completion rewards) that guide gameplay are heavy on exploration, but often a bit short on variety, i.e. collect 10 quest items, for the millionth time. What makes these quests and dungeons compelling—at least the first time through the game—is that they are driven by a strong, interesting setting.”

Because RPGs have a character-building ladder system, the reason many players don’t explore the MMO environments more fully is usually that their characters are graded too low to survive in higher-level zones. Some sort of safe passage is sometimes offered (i.e. roads where hostile NPCs don’t patrol), or sometimes swift transportation is available (riding or flying mounts in WOW) to encourage more exploration.

Most MMOs have graduated zones for each race. These offer playable regions challenging for characters within that given range, such as levels 1-5, 6-10, 11-15, etc. You play your character in a zone until it levels up to be able to enter (and survive in) the next zone. Each zone has level-related quests to fulfill to aid your advancement.***

Completing all available quests is also part of the achievement ladder. Players are encouraged to complete all quests in all zones, regardless of their level. The problem with this system is that, in many MMOs, when your high-level character enters a low-level zone (for example, for another race), the quests are ridiculously easy but yous till want to complete them. On the other hand, quests are designed to get players to explore the entire zone while questing, which increases the sense of immersion.

Where most games have a defined end (in RPGs, usually the defeat of a final boss character), MMOs are often open-ended: they can be played after the characters have reached their highest level, accomplished all available quests and defeated all the boss characters. Usually such activities are social: group raids, battlegrounds and dungeons outside the formal narrative and questing lines (essentially making them into fantasy variants on the FPS-PvP line of gaming). It’s also possible to create new characters and start again from level one, often choosing a different race, type/class (warrior, priest, hunter, etc.,) or even alliance.

As the goal of game design, immersion is difficult to achieve: it depends on the interaction of several factors, as well as the independent activities of players outside the scripted narrative. It’s an interesting challenge that, so far, no single game has managed to meet fully, but it’s always interesting to examine the results.  ****

* I started wargaming in the mid-1970s, bought a computer in 1977, and by around 1980 was writing a regular column on computer games for Moves magazine, as well as writing articles for contemporary programming magazines. I wrote about computers and game design for several magazines in the 1980s including Antic and ST Log, and published a column on technology in Canadian newspapers for a decade from the mid 1990s, which often looked at game developments.

** First-person shooters (FPS) like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor usually combine scripted scenarios with open or semi-open gameplay in a small environment. Very few have a fully open environment (Far Cry, however was one).

*** Level grinding is when you rush through all the available quests solely to get your characters up to a reasonable level of strength to be able to use powers or traits unlocked at higher levels, and then to engage in multiplayer activities like dungeons and raids. It’s common in WOW to see level 60-80 characters doing level 1-10 quests to complete their achievement ladders. For the lower level players, this can be frustrating as you watch a higher-level character blaze through an area, taking quest items or killing quest characters with ease, forcing you to wait for them to respawn. Guild Wars 2 has a different approach. When the player’s level is higher than the zone, that level is reduced in that zone to make repeat and collective quests competitive. A level 35 character, playing in a 1-5 zone, will play at level 3-5. Weapon and armour strengths are decreased accordingly. This is somewhat offset by the character’s accumulated buffs, unlocked skills and so on, so it is easier but still a challenge. This heightens the immersive value of GW2.

**** One of the things in WOW that, for me, detracts from immersion is the cartoonish style of characters and buildings. Games like Rift and GW2 have tried to make the player feel less distanced through more realistic graphics and animation. However, none of them are up to the detail or lifelike characters we see in Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. Some licence must be allowed, of course, for fantasy races and characters.

7,073 total views, 5 views today

Musings on Game Design

I really understand his comment on the narrative nature of wargames.

8,319 total views, 10 views today

Diablo III: Hype or Gaming Excellence?

8,308 total views, 5 views today


Company Name:
High Moon / Activision
Carlsbad, California
United States
Job Type:
Visual Arts
Position type:
Full Time
Experience Level:
Entry Level

Art Intern

Great Games Start with Great People!
High Moon Studios, part of Activision Blizzard, is developing a high-profile, action-packed title for Xbox 360(TM) and PlayStation®3.  Based in Carlsbad, we offer a creative and challenging environment that fosters collaboration, mentorship and camaraderie. We're dedicated to making successful high quality games, and we are looking for outstanding candidates to join our talented team.
Art Intern (Temporary)
An entry-level contributor whose primary duties involve art wrangling and asset management.
This position does not involve art creation.
·         Works with the environment and props artists to import art assets into the game engine.
·         Sets up base shaders and materials within the game engine.
·         Organizes art assets into proper folder locations and validates them.
·         Provides updates to the art team regarding the locations of art assets in the art pipeline.
·         Builds collision for 3D game assets.
·         Reports to the Art Director.
·         Familiarity with polygon modeling and UVW unwrapping in 3ds Max or Maya.
·         Proficient in the UI for either 3ds Max or Maya.
·         Proficient with Photoshop.
·         Perforce experience a plus, but not mandatory.
·         Communicates and collaborates effectively with the development team.
·         Meticulous attention to detail.
·         Able to adapt to change, rapid iterations, and revisions.
·         Handles constructive feedback well.
·         Strong problem-solving and troubleshooting skills.
·         Continuous learner.
Activision Blizzard and its affiliated companies is an equal employment opportunity and affirmative action employer.