Disrupting Thinking Why How We Read Matters

Supported with student conversations, classroom scenarios, practical strategies, and turn-and-talk moments, teachers and administrators can use this book as a guide for changing the way they think about teaching students to become thoughtful, skillful, attentive, responsive readers.

Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters is a book for the entire faculty. Supported with student conversations, classroom scenarios, practical strategies, and turn-and-talk moments, teachers and administrators will use this book as a guide for changing the way they think about teaching kids to become the thoughtful, skillful, attentive, responsive readers we want them to be, our democracy needs them to be. Kylene Beers and Bob Probst help us understand engagement, relevance, and talk along with day-to-day concerns of choice reading, incommon reading, and leveled reading. Kylene and Bob push our thinking in this book as they take on the challenge of changing how it is we read.

Key Features

• Provides classsroom vignettes, techniques and strategies to showcase change for entire faculty;
• Reads like a workshop in a book. Every chapter ends with a Turn-and-Talk.
• Deepens our understanding of reading and defines three kinds of readers: responsive, responsible, and emphatic.

Kylene Beers is an award-winning educator and is the author of When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do, Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading, Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, and Elements of Literature, the literature textbook read by the majority of middle school and high school students across the US. She began her teaching career in 1979 in the Alief School District, outside of Houston. Texas. Since then, she has become an internationally-known and respected authority in literacy education. Beers works tirelessly to help parents, teachers, and national policy makers understand how to best help struggling readers. In 2008-2009, she served as President of the National Council of Teachers of English and in 2011 she received an NCTE Leadership Award. She has served as a consultant to the National Governor’s Association Education Committee, was the editor of the national literacy journal Voices from the Middle, taught in the College of Education at the University of Houston, held a reading research position in the Comer School Development Program at Yale University School of Medicine, and has most recently served as the Senior Reading Advisor to the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Robert Probst, Ed.D., is an author and consultant to schools nationally and internationally. He speaks to administrators and teachers on literacy improvement, particularly issues surrounding struggling readers and meeting standards. Bob is Professor Emeritus of English Education at Georgia State University and has served as a research fellow for Florida International University. He has served as a member on the Conference on English Board of Directors, an NCTE journal columnist, and a member of the NCTE Commission on Reading. In 2004 he was awarded the NCTE Exemplary Leadership Award presented by the Conference on English Leadership.