Quotes from Kelly Gallagher

I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me, they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs.

Shouldn't schools be the place where students interact with interesting books? Shouldn't the faculty have an ongoing laser-like commitment to put good books in our students' hands? Shouldn't this be a front-burner issue at all times?

I also talk a lot in Deeper Reading about the importance that confusion plays. When my students come to me, they think confusion is bad. They are wrong. Confusion is the place where learning occurs.

I am not simply teaching the reading; I am teaching the reader.

To become a lifelong reader, one has to do a lot of varied and interesting reading.

What do teachers and curriculum directors mean by 'value' reading? A look at the practice of most schools suggests that when a school 'values' reading what it really means is that the school intensely focuses on raising state-mandated reading test scores- the kind of reading our students will rarely, if ever, do in adulthood.

Both of these students- both high school seniors both old enough to vote in the upcoming election- thought 'Al' Qaeda was a person. At that time the United States had been at war for five and a half years and here were two students two young adults leaving the educational system who had never heard of al Qaeda. Both by the way had passed the multiple-choice reading section of the state's high school exit exam.

WYTIWYG" (pronounced "witty-wig"): What You Test Is What You Get.

I want my students to understand that the ability to evaluate and judge is not a school skill; it is a life skill.

The sheer number of standards is the biggest impediment to implementing standards

Valuing reading" is often a euphemism for preparing students to pass mandated multiple-choice exams, and in dragging students down this path, schools are largely contributing to the development of readicide.

Authentic interest is generated when students are given the opportunity to delve deeply into an interesting idea.

Instead, I designed the unit with one question in mind: What is in the best interest of my students?

rewriting is where good papers emerge.

Clearly, if we want students to perform well on standardized reading tests, our top priority should not be on narrowing students into a test-prep curriculum; our focus should be on providing our students with the widest reading experiences possible.

It is modeling revision—taking a rough draft and moving it to a better place—that is critical if our students are to sharpen their writing skills.

Instead, to develop agency, our students would be better served if we created what Judy Wallis, a veteran teacher in Houston, refers to as a "three-text" classroom: a place where students encounter texts we all read, where students encounter texts that some of us read, and where students encounter texts that they read independently. Our students need a blended reading experience, and in Chapter 8 I discuss a model for developing this kind of a classroom. I

In other words, in an age of great shifts in education, very little has shifted when it comes to the teaching of adolescent readers. The teaching of reading remains stuck in a paradigm that doesn't work, and when students are stuck in a paradigm that doesn't work, there are dire consequences: •

National Writing Project sites: "Students need to read like writers and they need to write like readers.

the reading of fiction facilitated the development of social skills because it provides the reader with the experience of thinking about other people.

read books through the lens of life preparation.

I am not against teaching students how to take a test. Indeed, we want all of our students to have test-taking knowledge. However, the emphasis of teaching reading through the lens of preparing students for state-mandated tests has become so completely unbalanced that it is drowning any chance our adolescents have of developing into lifelong readers.

hitching your wagon blindly to any standards movement is rarely a good idea.

How do we get students to understand that the hard work and frustration that comes with learning how to write well is worth it? How do we get students to see the importance writing can play in their adult lives? How do we change the fact that seven out of ten students are leaving high school without adequate writing skills?