Penny Kittle

This for whatever reason took me forever to get through. It was quite good but I think I just kept going back to fiction instead. It has some great ideas and I know she's write about how much reading students need to do and how important choice is but it's still hard to slow down in the classroom enough to really support kids' reading and hold them accountable while still making it pleasurable. Still, there are ideas that I want to incorporate next year.

A Clarion call for teachers to be real about how much their students are reading, if at all, and how to build their ability to ultimately engage with the high level novels we fool ourselves as teachers into believing that they actually read and enjoy. It is full of great ideas for teachers to structure yearlong, even over the summer, choice reading.

Passionate, completely sensible, and full of good advice and examples. I'll give Kittle credit for at least acknowledging the existence of school libraries and librarians, which are often completely ignored (e.g., Kelly Gallagher's Readicide)in books like these, but she could have spent a chapter or at least a few pages discussing how librarians and teachers can collaborate.

In addition to useful, practical matters, this book asks teachers to truly consider their goals for students as future college students and adult readers. Is teaching 5-8 novels a year adequate to supporting student readers? How do we cultivate and tend to students as life-long readers?