This study investigated teacher attrition and retention in seven Virginia school divisions representing urban, suburban, and rural localities. Focus group interviews of teachers who stay in their school divisions and telephone interviews of teachers who migrated to another school division or who left the teaching profession revealed a hierarchy of organizational influences on teacher attrition and retention. A menu of state, district and building level recommendations are offered for retaining quality teachers.

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This article begins with a rationale for using “great” poems with children and the justification for linking the reading and writing of poetry. First, the author provides tips for teachers to use when selecting adult poems and offers a brief bibliography of classic poetry collections and anthologies appropriate for children. Next, suggestions for presenting and reading poems to students are given. Last, with anecdotes from her fifth‐grade classroom, she discusses how to use the reading of poetry as an opportunity for writing poetry in the classroom. The poetry link, which is a writing suggestion, statement, or assignment that stems from an original text, is a springboard to students' own writing. The author shows how this link, different from the traditional writing prompt, is created by students and the teacher, with the former taking the lead. The author advocates teaching “great” poetry to students to enhance students' perceptions, improve their writing, challenge their minds, and enrich their lives.

In spite of views that children's writing development is in large part a linguistic complex process involved in their engagement within and across social activities in and out of school, the literature is scant on the wide range of semiotic resources that children may draw on to animate their poetry writing and performances. Drawing from a case study of poetry writing and performance in one U.S. fifth-grade classroom, this article uses interpretive methods and textual analysis to ask the following questions: (a) What, if any, poetic language do children draw on and identify in their written poems? (b) What interdiscursive and intertextual writing practices do children draw on to write poetry? and (c) How, if at all, might the act of reading an original poem influence children's writing practices and literacy learning? Highlighted by three focal students, data suggest that children's poems most often used features, including stanza break, varied types of rhyme, alliteration, and metaphor. Furthermore, some children's poems could even be classified into distinct poetic structures. The data also suggest that children appropriated and recontextualized content for a single poem from a variety of semiotic resources in and out of school. Finally, children's performances were caught up with satisfying multiple audiences, including themselves. This study suggests that elementary children can control the process of poetry writing and performance through active integration of formal poetic language taught with interdiscursive and intertextual practices.

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This study explored students' perceptions of what engages them in high school and their perceptions of how standards-based reform affected their learning. We interviewed 33 students from seven comprehensive high schools in metropolitan Virginia. Even though students indicated more engagement when instruction included authentic learning experiences and challenging activities, the implementation of state standards of learning (SOL) reportedly caused a "rushed" learning environment. We concluded that an unintended negative consequence of Standards of Learning may be that the quality of instruction is less engaging to students.