Recommended Readings

Atwell, Nancie. In the Middle: New Understandings About Writing, Reading, and Learning. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers.

In the Middle is a book I’ve come to rely on almost daily in my fifth grade classroom. It combines research-based practices with many functional and certainly useful practices. Nancie Atwell addresses reading and writing as two sides of the same coin – using strategies to draw out meaning in reading can serve double-duty in writing instruction. Atwell speaks at length about the workshop model of language arts, conferring about writing, responding to readers, and evaluating progress over time. She includes 17 appendices filled with surveys, spelling lists, record systems, collections of poetry and literature, and checksheets. Atwell understands how students read and write, and she provides plenty of tools to help us help them.
-- review by Sara Palmer

Beers, Kylene. (2003) When Kids Can’t Read. Portsmouth, NH:  Heinemann.

This instructional guide provides practical strategies in diagnosis of reading difficulties.  Clearly addressed to teachers, this text provides activities to engage reluctant and/or struggling readers in the classroom.  Never preaching to unrealistic classroom environments, Beers provides answers to questions about what teachers can do for students. In engaging reluctant readers in identifying themselves as readers, every suggestion is based on a student any teacher would have in class.

Robb, Laura.Teaching Reading in Social Studies, Science and Math (3-8),  Scholastic Professional Books  2003   New York.

This book focuses on integrating reading instruction into content area reading. Use these research based activities, graphic organizers and practical strategies to weave comprehension into your content area teaching.  Find countless ideas to help you teach your students how to read and comprehend their textbooks. Laura Robb shares strategies to use before, during and after reading to help you empower your students to learn through discussion, vocabulary development and the use literature in the content area.  Strategy snapshots bring you into the classroom  providing step by step lessons from actual classrooms.
-- review by Margaret Bartley

Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C., & Hurwitz, L. (1999). Reading for understanding: A guide to improving reading in middle and high school classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

This text focuses on the relevance of building a strong classroom environment that supports the social and personal aspects of reader identification, along with the cognitive and knowledge-building dimensions. At the center is the metacognitive conversation that needs to take place between the teacher and students. This conversation enables students to identify as readers and thinkers. The text provides guidelines for teaching and creating the four classroom dimensions (social, personal, cognitive, and knowledge-building) along with ways of developing the metacognitive piece. This text is not scripted, but rather invites the teacher to use what information she wants based upon her understanding of her own students. The teacher, then, employs her own metacognition when implementing the comprehension strategies from the text.
-- review by Barbara Bradbury

Tovani, Chris. (2004) Do I Really Have to Teach Reading?: Content, Comprehension, Grades 6-12.Stenhouse Publishers. Portland.

This book offers practical suggestions for teachers across the curriculum to integrate the teaching of reading into their content classes. Tovani discusses real-life scenarios from her classroom and gives the reader a variety of techniques and diverse applications of these techniques to try in class. The book itself is easy to read, accessible to middle and secondary educators and has a fabulous appendix with useful forms. It is especially nice that Tovani writes about her own thinking processes as she struggled in her own classroom – she offers us explicit teaching and modeling just as she suggests we do for our students.
-- review by Kristen Iverson

Tovani, Chris. (2000) I Read It, But I Don’t Get It; Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers.  Portland: Stenhouse Publishers.

Chris Tovani does a fantastic job meshing the theory of reading instructions with practical strategies for various circumstances in I Read It, But I Don’t Get It; Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers.  She focuses on setting expectations, purpose, and “tracking confusion at its source.”  Once the scene is set, “purpose is everything.” The book moves into case studies and strategies at the conclusion of each chapter with a short list of what good reading looks like as it relates to that chapter.  Each part details comprehensive strategies to use with reluctant readers as well as Teaching Points which include a list of What Works related to the scenario described in that part. Perhaps what I appreciated about this book most was the way it uncovered the mysteries of building conscious active learners in our classrooms.

Back to Homepage