Prioritize Helping Our Students Fall in Love With Reading (Again)

When working with ELA and literacy educators to increase students’ engagement and achievement in reading, I often run into a set of...

Untangling Student Avoidance for Reading

I recently published a book with Solution Tree called Inspiring Lifelong Readers: Using Inquiry to Engage Learners in Grades 6-12. In it I share...

It’s Not Too Late! Identifying Older Students for Literacy Intervention

I was sitting in my doctoral quantitative research class feeling overwhelmed and frankly, stupid. I didn’t understand numbers. I was an English...

Five Surefire Ways to Engage Adolescent Readers

Reading for enjoyment can have tremendous physical and mental health benefits, from increasing empathy, building our vocabulary, reducing...

Assessing Independent Reading Without Killing our Students’ Love of Books

Of course, educators want students to develop into lifelong readers and learners. We want our students to find genres, authors, series,...

Amplifying Voice and Choice with Book Clubs

When I first introduced book clubs to my sophomores more than a decade ago, I had no idea what I was doing. I just knew that I needed...

Building Professional Community with Picture Books

Leadership teams wanting to bring about any kind of change in schools right now may be (understandably) met with resistance from the...

Carrots and Candy: Letting Go of Rewards in Favor of True Motivation

Pizza for reading, tickets for good behavior, points for participation, stickers for homework completion, marbles in a jar for teamwork,...

Reimagining Assessment for Inquiry in ELA

When we shift from a traditional approach to an inquiry approach in our classrooms, we also must shift how we assess and grade our...

Looking to Literacy Leaders for Hope

The most recent news about the NAEP reading scores are concerning for sure. The headlines are scary: “NAEP Scores Show Large Declines in Reading...

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