The constructivist approach provides a framework for my classroom. I want it to be an active space where students have opportunities to express themselves and make things. This means students have agency and choices regarding what they read and write, and how they are to be assessed. Formal and informal formative assessment is a central tenet of the approach, emphasizing the importance of effective descriptive feedback to aid student reflection. Student work will be more relevant to their lives, bridging classroom learning to the world outside of school. And students will learn with intrinsic motivation, naturally reaching higher levels of taxonomy.

Social learning and collaboration are critical elements of a student-centered classroom. The careful and intentional building of a learning community connects students, establishes meaningful goals, and makes the classroom equitable. Literacy practices are embedded in complicated social relationships, ELA is not solitary. Informal writing especially benefits from a community of learners, through a writing community. Through the writing community, students share challenge and success. By collaborating in low stakes informal writing engagements, students process, develop, improve, and refine their work to meet high standards and solve authentic problems.

In the 21^st century, the ELA classroom must be more than reading and writing. Advancements in technology support multimodal learning. It is easier now more than ever to engage students in different modalities, whether they are visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and interactive methods.

The landscape of text forms has also expanded. Students should be able to demonstrate their learning in a variety of alternatives to formal writing, such as text with images, graphs, infographics, audio, video, multimedia, interactive web documents, live performance, and more. In addition, the resources, and materials I provide to students will be a diverse selection of text forms. In terms of the text-based materials, I place special emphasis on information texts and non-canon literature.

Information texts are especially important to the 21^st century ELA classroom. Success in school, the workplace, and society depends on our ability to comprehend these texts. Access to these texts is equitable, as it allows students to realize their power, agency, and participate in a democratic society. Canon texts are made privileged due to elitist authority structures and are, for the most part, not relevant to our students’ lived experiences. These texts should not supplant emerging, contemporary books, and sequential art such as graphic novels and comic books.

The internet has resulted in a widespread recording of informal writing, offering opportunities to study it in new and exciting ways. The internet has made significant contributions to the evolution of language and is subverting the domination of the formal writing practices that have been privileged since the invention of modern-day printing presses.

The internet and digital age tools are shifting the landscape of language as it invites all dialects and forms, unedited, unfiltered, and uninterested in the aging usage preferences of formal writing. The internet has an important and unique social component that resonates with humans, we are compelled to respond to one another, and this happens primarily through informal writing, much to the dismay of our traditional classrooms.

The ways young people communicate is rapidly changing on a society-wide scale as they navigate, negotiate, and construct identity in digital spaces using internet-enabled tools. Informal writing is the language of these spaces where individuality is in an intricate balance with in-group norms. At home and in our classrooms, students are producing language that expresses their personality, agency, mood, and unique in-group conventions in dynamic conversations.

By using digital age tools in our classrooms, we are inviting this important change in the evolution of language. We are all speakers of internet as a cultural context. The internet allows more of a language's informal register to be written down and become timeless. By using these tools in our classrooms, we invite students to play, experiment, and embrace personal clarity over the formal trappings of writing for elitists, disembodied usage preferences which suffocate creativity and growth.

In my classroom I will incorporate out-of-school literacies, popular culture, and contemporary text forms, such as film, TV, music, lyrics, magazines, and information texts like editorials, articles, and web materials to create a broader view of literacy that is welcoming to youth. This also means reconsidering the canon literature that has dominated ELA classrooms in favor of these new text forms.

In my culturally relevant classroom, my students are writing for authentic audiences and engaging topics and ideas that really matter to them. This means honoring and accepting cultural references into the classroom, these are relevant to my students’ lives and a part of their identities. This means being willing to honor different text forms that I may not completely understand. My students will implement their out-of-school literacies while engaging with the academic world of school. These applications all bridge the gap between “in-school” and “out-of-school" literacies. These elements are a critical and are in-sync with constructivist theory.

Community and collaboration will be the center of my student-centered classroom. It will be open to diverse voices, where communication occurs in the form of students’ home dialects. It will be accepting of cultural and personal histories.