What Are You Reading: March 2015

1. Lisa is reading Well Spoken: Teaching Speaking to All Students by Erik Palmer. She shares this quote: "Speaking well really is an art, though most of us have been speaking since we were young children. Carefully choosing our words, organizing our ideas so they are easy to follow, captivating an audience by employing effective gestures, or pacing our speech for emphasis--these are the building blocks of good public speaking. Every student can learn them, practice them, and perform them. But first, they need conscientious teachers who will show them how."
2. Andrea is reading Best Practices in Literacy Instruction, 5th Edition. It is the required text for a course she is teaching.
3. Jaimie says, "I am reading Jan Richardson's The Next Step in Guided Reading AGAIN (for like the third or fourth time) along with her new Next Step: Guided Reading in Action videos. We have several teachers that wanted to do a book study on this book. It offers some useful guidelines for planning small group lessons for children at different stages of reading. It also has many concrete strategies that students can use when retelling/summarizing text (one of the most complicated things for kids to do)."
4. Julie is reading No More Independent Reading Without Support by Debbie Miller and Barbara Moss.
5. Heather is reading Five Levers to Improve Learning by (Wisconsin's own!) Tony Frontier and James Rickabaugh. Heather says the book, ". . . discusses different initiatives through a discussion of different levels focusing on potentials and limitations."
6. Carrie is reading Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel. Carrie says, "After reading an article published in the October edition of Educational Leadership, I was interested enough in the topic to pick up a book. A great resource for intervention ideas, especially the strategies for teaching students how to tackle information for long-term learning. One of the two most interesting ideas: frequent low-stakes assessment of material and getting rid of rereading to prep for tests!"
7. Bobbi says, "I am reading  the blog post Two Writing Teachers recommended to me by Diane Sweeney.  This blog site has many useful articles and resources. Some examples of topics include the following:Curating Mentor Text Collections, Transitional Words and Phrases, and Developing Information Writing Muscles: Writing About Science."
8. Barb is reading along with Read On Wisconsin and just finished Coldest Girl in Cold Town by Holly Black. She says, "Coldest Girl in Cold Town is a vampire story that would definitely appeal to readers of Twilight. Although the book wasn't really my style, it did raise some interesting questions about the influence of social media on teenagers."

Join the conversation by using the comments to tell us what you're reading.