This award-winning book continues to resonate with teachers and inspire their teaching because it focuses on the joy of reading and how it can engage and even transform readers. In a time of next-generation standards that emphasize higher-order strategies, text complexity, and the reading of nonfiction, “You Gotta BE the Book” continues to help teachers meet new challenges, including those of increasing cultural diversity. At the core of Wilhelm’s foundational text is an in-depth account of what highly motivated adolescent readers actually do when they read, and how to help struggling readers take on those same stances and strategies. His work offers a robust model teachers can use to prepare students for the demands of disciplinary understanding and for literacy in the real world. The Third Edition includes new commentaries and tips for using visual techniques, drama and action strategies, think-aloud protocols, and symbolic story representation/reading manipulatives. Book Features: A data-driven theory of literature and literary reading as engagement. A case for undertaking teacher research with students. An approach for using drama and visual art to support readers’ comprehension. Guidance for assisting students in the use of higher-order strategies of reading (and writing) as required by next-generation standards like the Common Core. Classroom interventions to help all students, especially reluctant ones, become successful readers. Online resources, including inquiry unit templates, tools for teaching with drama, and tips for using visual techniques.

Lessons from Chevys -- Developing competence and providing control -- Teaching so it matters -- Making literacy visible and social -- A look at writing : getting to the heart of the matter -- Present possibilities.

Strategic Reading provides the tools teachers need to help students of all abilities make the important transition to higher-level texts.

This book lays out a new vision for the teaching of English, building on themes central to Wilhelm's influential "You Gotta BE The Book." With portraits of teachers and students, as well as practical strategies and advice, they provide a roadmap to educational transformation far beyond the field of English. --from publisher description

This book offers a highly revealing and troubling view of today's high school students and the ways they pursue high grades and success. Denise Pope, veteran teacher and curriculum expert, follows five motivated and successful students through a school year, closely shadowing them and engaging them in lengthy reflections on their school experiences. What emerges is a double-sided picture of school success. On the one hand, these students work hard in school, participate in extracurricular activities, serve their communities, earn awards and honours, and appear to uphold school values. But on the other hand, they feel that in order to get ahead they must compromise their values and manipulate the system by scheming, lying, and cheating. In short, they do school, that is, they are not really engaged with learning nor can they commit to such values as integrity and community. The words and actions of these five students - two boys and three girls from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds - underscore the frustrations of being caught in a grade trap that pins future success to high grades and test scores. Their stories raise critical questions that are too important for parents, educators, and community leaders to ignore. Are schools cultivating an environment that promotes intellectual curiosity, cooperation, and integrity? Or are they fostering anxiety, deception, and hostility? Do today's schools inadvertently impede the very values they claim to embrace? Is the success that current assessment practices measure the kind of success we want for our children?

The problems of boys in schools, especially in reading and writing, have been the focus of statistical data, but rarely does research point out how literacy educators can combat those problems. That situation has changed. Michael Smith and Jeff Wilhelm, two of the most respected names in English education and in the teaching of reading, worked with a very diverse group of young men to understand how they use literacy and what conditions promote it. In this book they share what they have learned. Through a variety of creative research methods and an extended series of interviews with 49 young men in middle and high school who differ in class, race, academic achievement, kind of school, and geography, the authors identified the factors that motivated these young men to become accomplished in the activities they most enjoyed--factors that marked the boys' literate activities outside of school, but were largely absent from their literate lives in school. Their study questions the way reading and literature are typically taught and suggests powerful alternatives to traditional instruction. Building their findings on their understanding of the powerful and engaging experiences boys had outside of school, Smith and Wilhelm discuss why boys embrace or reject certain ways of being literate, how boys read and engage with different kinds of texts, and what qualities of texts appeal to boys. Throughout, the authors highlight the importance of choice, the boys' need to be shown how to read, the cost of the traditional teaching of difficult canonical texts, and the crucial place of meaningful social activity. The authors' data-driven findings are provocative, explaining why boys reject much of school literacy and how progressive curricula and instruction might help boys engage with literacy and all learning in more productive ways. Providing both challenges and practical advice for overcoming those challenges, Smith and Wilhelm have produced a book that will appeal to teachers, teacher educators, and parents alike.

Explores the reading habits of teens and how educators can learn how to teach reading from the choices that young readers make for themselves.

Deborah Appleman is a dynamo.... A] positive energy of possibility is reflected in all her work, including the book you hold in your hands now. - Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, coauthor of Reading Don't Fix No Chevys Just as adolescents aren't only students, literate behaviors aren't only for school. Engaging students in reading for pleasure through extramural book clubs can promote both lifelong literacy habits and improved in-school performance. Reading for Themselves shows you how to create and make the most of out-of-class book clubs. Based on five years of research in urban and suburban schools, Reading for Themselves provides a theoretical rationale for starting out-of-school book clubs and practical strategies for nurturing them. Deborah Appleman shows you how book clubs simultaneously give teenagers a positive reading experience and give you insights about their reading and useful information for instruction. With numerous examples drawn from student book clubs, Appleman offers smart suggestions for: helping reluctant readers become enthusiastic, lifelong readers giving students a structure within which to discover an extracurricular reading life as they transition toward adulthood using alternative instructional practices to encourage students as they read understanding how gender affects literacy practices and how it can inform your teaching practices building bridges between kids by using contemporary literature as a starting point for discussions of issues of race, class, and culture Reading for Themselves gives you, the teacher, all the tools you need to play the role of facilitatorincluding book lists and facilitator's tipsin a book club motivated by student choice and interest. As your book club reads on, Appleman is there with ways to help readers negotiate the passage between adolescent and adult literacy, the border between school-sponsored and self-sponsored reading, and the differences in identity between groups from diverse geographical, social, and cultural backgrounds. Pleasure is the most compelling purpose for reading, and there's no better way to introduce students to the joys of lifelong reading than with out-of-school book clubs. Read Deborah Appleman today and get your students Reading for Themselves.

Smith dismantles the shoddy science undergirding direct, intensive, and early phonics training.