I am happy to announce that my newest book for reading coaches, Coaching the Threads of Reading: Strategies for Teacher Success has now been released. This book goes beyond the usual tips found in most literacy coaching books on how to set up a coaching schedule, build rapport and work with teachers. Coaching the Threads [...]

I was appalled by Arnie Duncan’s recent comment that professional development dollars are being “wasted” in school districts across the country.  While there may be districts out there who still use their money for “drive by” professional development which we know is ineffective, most of the districts that I see are using job-embedded coaching and [...]

A good way to help students think about what they read and increase their comprehension of the text is to use a method called Questions into Paragraphs. Developed by McLaughlin (1987) the QuIP procedure helps students think about text both before they read as well as after reading. Students develop or are given 3 related [...]

Kids love using technology so why not capitalize on technology to build student reading skills especially for English Language Learners and struggling readers?  The Lit2Go website (see link below) has some great books that you can download to your classroom computers or  iPods. Students can listen to the stories while reading the text or simply [...]

Get students interested in monitoring their own reactions to text by asking them to rate each chapter of a book they are reading on an “interest level” chart.  After reading each chapter, students color in the bar to indicate how interested they were in the text of that chapter. Students can then discuss their reactions [...]