•Writing helps students explore their own feelings and to share these feelings with others.

•Classrooms are a safe place where students can experiment with their own viewpoints and respectfully exchange ideas with others.

•Learning should be relevant to a student’s interests and needs, focusing on helping children grow toward personal goals and standards.

•Students should be active participants in learning, taking part in instructional decisions and taking responsibility for classroom behavior and coursework.

• Learning, reading, and writing should be relevant to current events and issues that matter to students.

•Students should be able to demonstrate their learning using diverse measures of evaluation that best reflect their growth.

•Varying strengths and weaknesses should be recognized, discussed, and celebrated in the classroom, helping students to maximize their potential as learners.

• Language Arts curricula should embrace multiple disciplines, recognizing the interconnectedness of knowledge in all arts and sciences and using these connections to build understanding.

•Students should use a variety of literary theories to produce contextualized, individualized responses to works of literature that deepen understanding of not only theory, but also the work of literature and the world.

•Students should be exposed to a plethora of literatures of many cultures, helping them to better understand their own cultural experiences and those of others.