Cris Tovani is an accomplished teacher and staff developer who writes with verve and humor about the challenges of working with students at all levels of achievement—from those who have mastered the art of "fake reading" to college-bound juniors and seniors who struggle with the different demands of content-area textbooks and novels.Enter Cris' classroom, a place where students are continually learning new strategies for tackling difficult text. You will be taken step-by-step through practical, theory-based reading instruction that can be adapted for use in any subject area. The book features:anecdotes in each chapter about real kids with real universal problems. You will identify with these adolescents and will see how these problems can be solved;a thoughtful explanation of current theories of comprehension instruction and how they might be adapted for use with adolescents;a What Works section in each of the last seven chapters that offers simple ideas you can immediately employ in your classroom. The suggestions can be used in a variety of content areas and grade levels(6-12);teaching tips and ideas that benefit struggling readers as well as proficient and advanced readers;appendixes with reproducible materials that you can use in your classroom, including coding sheets, double entry diaries, and comprehension constructors.In a time when students need increasingly sophisticated reading skills, this book will provide support for teachers who want to incorporate comprehension instruction into their daily lesson plans without sacrificing content knowledge.

    The authors explore the important relationship between text, learner, and learning. With an array of methods and assignments to establish critical literacy in a discussion-based and reflective classroom, you ll encourage students to find meaning and cultivate thinking from even the most challenging expository texts."

    Beers and Probst offer insights into how to create text dependent questioning in assisting students to develop greater reading comprehension skills.

    It opens with a clear research-based rationale for teaching oral reading, word recognition, fluency, and comprehension. From there, Rasinski provides the strategies themselves - read aloud, repeated reading, performance reading, and many more. The strategies are fun, easy to implement, and -- most important -- effective in helping children read with ease, confidence, and understanding.Praise for The Fluent Reader:"What I find remarkable about The Fluent Reader is the way Timothy Rasinski leads us from the theoretical to the practical...I suspect that teachers who read this book will be quick to take the ideas and apply them in their classrooms." ---From the foreword by James Hoffman, University of Texas at Austin

    Nevertheless, many teachers end up using language patterns that undermine these goals. Do any of these scenarios sound familiar?We want students to take responsibility for their learning, yet we use language that implies teacher ownership.We want to build positive relationships with students, yet we use sarcasm when we get frustrated.We want students to think learning is fun, yet we sometimes make comments that suggest the opposite.We want students to exhibit good behavior because it's the right thing to do, yet we rely on threats and bribes, which implies students don't naturally want to be good.What teachers say to students--when they praise or discipline, give directions or ask questions, and introduce concepts or share stories--affects student learning and behavior. A slight change in intonation can also dramatically change how language feels for students. In What We Say and How We Say It Matter, Mike Anderson digs into the nuances of language in the classroom. This book's many examples will help teachers examine their language habits and intentionally improve their classroom practice so their language matches and supports their goals.

    It's never too late."-Penny KittlePenny Kittle wants us to face the hard truths every English teacher fears: too many kids don't read the assigned texts, and some even manage to slip by without having ever read a single book by the time they graduate. As middle and high school reading declines, college professors lament students' inability to comprehend and analyze complex texts, while the rest of us wonder: what do we lose as a society when so many of our high school graduates have no interest in reading anything?In Book Love Penny takes student apathy head on, first by recognizing why students don't read and then showing us that when we give kids books that are right for them, along with time to read and regular response to their thinking, we can create a pathway to satisfying reading that leads to more challenging literature and ultimately, a love of reading. With a clear eye on the reality of today's classrooms, Penny provides practical strategies and advice on:increasing volume, capacity, and complexity over time creating a balance of independent reading, text study, and novel study helping students deepen their thinking through writing about reading building a classroom library with themes that matter to 21st century kids. Book Love is a call to arms for putting every single kid, no exceptions allowed, on a personal reading journey. But much more than that, it's a powerful reminder of why we became English teachers in the first place: our passion for books. Books matter. Stories heal. The right book in the hands of a kid can change a life forever. We can't wait for anyone else to teach our students a love of books-it's up to us and the time is now. If not you, who? For information about the Book Love Foundation, which provides classroom libraries to deserving teachers and schools, visit booklovefoundation.org.

    Then, open these pages.Welcome to Debbie Miller's real classroom where real students are learning to love to read, to write, and are together creating a collaborative and caring environment. In this book, Debbie focuses on how best to teach children strategies for comprehending text. She leads the reader through the course of a year showing how her students learn to become thoughtful, independent, and strategic readers. Through explicit instruction, modeling, classroom discussion, and, most important, by gradually releasing responsibility to her students, Debbie provides a model for creating a climate and culture of thinking and learning.Here you will learn:techniques for modeling thinking;specific examples of modeled strategy lessons for inferring, asking questions, making connections, determining importance in text, creating mental images, and synthesizing information;how to help children make their thinking visible through oral, written, artistic, and dramatic responses to literature;how to successfully develop book clubs as a way for children to share their thinking.Reading with Meaning shows you how to bring your imagined classroom to life. You will emerge with new tools for teaching comprehension strategies and a firm appreciation that a rigorous classroom can also be nurturing and joyful.

    Burkins and Croft help teachers prevent guided reading from going astray by presenting strategies, adaptations, and supports that help them work through common instructional problems.

    Now, in Leading with Focus, he shows administrators, principals, and other education leaders how to apply his model to the work of running schools and districts. In this companion to his previous book, Schmoker offers* An overview of the case for simple, focused school and district leadership--demonstrating its power for vastly improving the work of teachers and leaders.* Examples of real schools and districts that have embraced focused leadership--and the incredible results for student learning.* A practical, flexible, and easy-to-follow implementation guide for ensuring focused leadership in schools and districts.All students deserve to learn in schools where educators eschew distractions and superfluous activities to concentrate on what's most important. To that end, this book is an essential resource for leaders ready to streamline their practice and focus their efforts on radically improving student learning.

    Lifelong readers need passion, agency, and a sense of inquiry in their reading lives. They also need books.In It's All About the Books, Tammy Mulligan and Clare Landrigan share the systems they have developed over the last 15 years to create classroom libraries and book rooms that support both student choice and instructional goals.Getting started with designing and provisioning classroom libraries and bookrooms to support lifelong readers involves collaboration, planning, and some elbow grease! It's All About the Books is a practical yet detailed guide to creating a system where classroom libraries and bookrooms work seamlessly together to make it easy for teachers to find books to engage and scaffold all students in a school community. Each chapter includes photos, resources, book lists, and a step-by-step outline of the process so you can get started right away. From design, to inventory, to organizing, purchasing, and using these books in the classroom-they demonstrate how to make the most of what you have, and how to get what need on a budget.Every child deserves the opportunity to become a lifelong reader. It's All About the Books will help you transform how you organize books across the entire school to make each teacher's book supply seem endless in the eyes of a reader. Teachers must have easy access to what they need, when they need it, because in the life of a reader the right book at the right time makes all the difference.-Tammy and Clare want this book to impact the lives of teachers and students directly so they are donating all author royalties it generates to the Book Love Foundation.Book Love is a not-for-profit organization founded by Penny Kittle with one goal: to put books in the hands of teenagers. Our book will now expand that goal and put books into the hands of elementary and middle grade students as well. Thank you, Penny, for allowing us to bring the heart of this book to life through your hard work and vision.-Tammy and Clare

    It is my hope to help you find those books. More importantly, I hope to help you guide students to the next great book and the one after that. That is the purpose of Reading Ladders. Because it is not sufficient to find just one book for each reader. -Teri LesesneI finished the Twilight Series-now what?With Reading Ladders, the answer to a question like this can become the first rung on a student's climb to greater engagement with books, to full independence, and beyond to a lifetime of passionate reading.The goal of reading ladders, writes Teri Lesesne, is to slowly move students from where they are to where we would like them to be. With reading ladders you start with the authors, genres, or subjects your readers like then connect them to book after book-each a little more complex or challenging than the last. Teri not only shares ready-to-go ladders, but her suggestions will help you:select books to create your own reading ladders build a classroom library that supports every student's needs use reading ladders to bolster content-area knowledge and build independence assess where students are at and how far they've climbed.If we are about creating lifetime readers and not just readers who can utilize phonological awareness and context clues to bubble in answers on a state test, writes Teri Lesesne, then we need to help our students form lasting relationships with books and authors and genres and formats. Use Reading Ladders, help your students start their climb, and guide them to new heights in reading.

    It's not easy to explain these abstract reading strategies to elementary readers, yet knowing how they work and how to use them is an important first step to connecting with texts. Fortunately Tanny McGregor has developed visual, tangible, everyday lessons that make abstract thinking concrete and that can help every child in your classroom make more effective use of reading comprehension strategies.Comprehension Connections is a guide to developing children's ability to fully understand texts by making the comprehension process achievable, accessible, and incremental. McGregor's approach sequences stages of learning for each strategy that take students from a fun object lesson to a nuanced and lasting understanding. Her lessons build bridges between the concrete and the abstract by incorporating writing, discussion, song, art, and movement into a web of creative connections that reinforce each strategy on a variety of levels. All the while Comprehension Connections offers an inside look at the dynamic of McGregor's teaching, showing you how her ideas look in action, and including the language she uses and that she encourages her students to use as they build their facility with: schema inferring questioning determining importance visualizing synthesizing. Many students struggle to understand what it is they are supposed to do as they learn to read strategically. Help them make connections to the ideas behind reading and watch as your readers go deeper into texts than ever before.

    Smokey Daniels travels the country supporting well planned and organized inquiry teaching, and he gets these two questions most often:Where do I find the time? What are some simple ways I can try with my kids? The Curious Classroom answers these questions. It shares a ladder of 10 inquiry structures. Begin with briefly modeling your own curiosity or start on a higher rung as you gradually move toward units driven by kids' own questions.Ever wonder how to get students genuinely engaged in your curriculum? Or wish you could let them explore those amazing questions they brim with? If so, Smokey provides research-based suggestions that help cover the curriculum by connecting what kids wonder about to the wonders you have to teach them. He shares 10 structures, 34 inspiring models from teachers nationwide, full-color photographs and examples of students work, plus specific suggestions for assessment and grading.Just getting started with inquiry? Looking for your own next step in student-driven inquiry? Or do you just want new teaching ideas to try? Read The Curious Classroom. "By the end of this book," writes Smokey Daniels, "I hope you will say two things:I never knew my kids were capable of working at this level; andThis is the most fun I have ever had in my teaching life."

    Managing classroom book clubs can be hard. Real hard. But honestly, is there any better way to get students vested in reading? When book clubs work, don't they create a culture of reading unlike anything else? One that brings out the very best in our students?With both infectious enthusiasm and a realistic perspective, Sonja and Dana take on teachers' doubts and concerns about book clubs, and build a compelling case for their value in every classroom. They provide all the nuts and bolts for creating and managing successful book clubs, including:Dozens of pitfalls and pathways minilessons that address common roadblocks Tips for using technology to enhance book club work for deeper student engagement Suggested book bins for book club work, organized by grade level and genre. Whether you're looking to breathe new life into book clubs or begin implementing them in your classroom, Sonja and Dana give you essential strategies to make book clubs work. Because book clubs, they write, are where students fall in love with reading.

    Here is a brief overview of each part: Part 1, Seeing the Big Picture Connections First, defines curriculum in terms of rigor, provides the background of this model, connects curriculum design to the big picture of standards, assessments, instruction, and data practices, previews the step-by-step design sequence, and introduces end-of-chapter reader assignments. Part 2, Building the Foundation for Designing Curricular Units, explains the five steps that must first be taken to lay the foundation upon which to build the curricular units of study, and provides explicit guidelines for applying each step. Part 3, Designing the Curricular Unit of Study From Start to Finish, gives the nuts and bolts directions for designing a rigorous curricular unit of study, from beginning to end, and concludes with an overview of how to implement the unit in the classroom or instructional program. Formatively assessing students along the way, educators analyze resulting student data to diagnose student learning needs and then adjust ongoing instruction accordingly. Part 4, Organizing, Monitoring, and Sustaining Implementation Efforts, addresses the role of administrators in beginning and continuing the work of implementation. These final three chapters provide first-person narra - tives and advice to administrators from administrators who have personally led the implementation and sustainability efforts of curriculum redesign and related practices within their own school systems. I have endeavored to pull together all of the elements necessary for designing a rigorous curriculum, to position these elements in a sequential order, and to provide a step-by-step approach for constructing each one. My hope is that this road map will not only show you the way to design your own curriculum, but also allow you the flexibility of customizing it to fit your own purpose and needs. As with the realization of any lofty vision, it will take a great deal of time, thought, energy, and collaboration to create and revise a single curriculum, let alone multiple curricula. The best advice I can offer is to regard whatever you produce as a continual work in progress, to be accomplished over one, two, or three years, or even longer. As my friend and colleague Robert Kuklis points out, curriculum designers shape and modify the process as they move through it. It is important that they know this is not a rigid, prescriptive procedure, but rather an opportunity for learning, adapting, and improving. This preserves fidelity to the process, encourages flexibility, and promotes local ownership. Whenever people s spirits need lifting because the work seems so demanding, remind everyone that it is a process, not a one-time event. You are creating something truly significant a comprehensive body of work that is going to serve your educators, students, and parents for years to come!"