Allen, Janet, Yellow Brick Roads, Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishing, 2000.
Janet Allen offers wisdom, humor, and insightful portraits of how she helped her reluctant H.S. students become engaged and critical readers. She includes great descriptions and bibliographies for read-aloud, shared, guided, and independent reading. Resources include graphic organizers to support strategy lessons, assessment practices that inform instruction, strategies for using reading as a path to writing instruction, and ways of organizing a classroom literacy environment.

Anderson, Carl, How's It Going? A Practical Guide to Conferring with Student Writers, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Press, 2000.
Anderson provides rationale and strategies for making one-on-one conversations between teacher and students during workshop time the perfect vehicle for helping individual children, doing on-the-spot assessment, and providing direction for future minilessons.

Cooper, J. David, Literacy: Helping Children Construct Meaning (4th edition), New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
A clear, concise textbook that traces the history of the teaching of reading in the U.S., reviews the research on comprehension, and explicitly sets forth how to develop a balanced literacy program. The author describes strategies for teaching reading, writing, spelling, and vocabulary, and situates all his work from a constructivist perspective.

Finn, Patrick, Literacy with an Attitude, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999.
A lively review of sociological research on the teaching of literacy in working-class vs. middle-class schools. The author makes the important distinction between functional literacy (taught in working-class schools) vs. critical literacy (taught in middle and upper class schools). Sections of this book would provide great material for Socratic Seminars with staffs.

Harvey, S. & Goudvis, A. Strategies that Work, York, ME: Stenhouse Publishing, 2000.
The authors provide detailed descriptions of their creative ways of teaching the reading comprehension strategies. Examples from classrooms, recording strategies, and excellent bibliographies of children's books make this a very useful book.

Hoyt, Linda Snapshots: Literacy Minilessons Up Close, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing, 2000.
The author provides over 170 minilessons for understanding individual words, text conventions, how to choose books, peer editing, and comprehension strategies. Hoyt embeds these minilessons in workshops that also include guided and independent practice and reflection. Also included are running record forms and reading logs to help keep track of children's reading development.

Johnson, Peter Knowing Literacy, York, ME: Stenhouse Publishing, 1997.
The author writes about assessment of literacy development from a constructivist perspective. His stance that all assessment is an interpretive act, and the strategies he offers for documenting, keeping track, and finding patterns in children's literacy work make this a valuable text. It comes with a tape that demonstrates how to do running records.

Keene, E. and Zimmerman, S. Mosaic of Thought, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Publishing, 1997.
This book feels like a classic already. The authors describe the research on reading comprehension strategies and make the strategies come alive with personal narratives of their introspective exploration of themselves as readers. Embedded in each chapter are creative ways of teaching children to use and master the comprehension strategies.

Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C., & Hurwitz, L. Reading for Understanding, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1999.
The authors, who are researchers and teachers, tackle how to help middle and senior high school students become strategic readers. Their strategies include helping students take control of their attention while reading, understand and use comprehension strategies, and learn to read academic texts in different disciplines (e.g., history, science, and math). They offer an excellent syllabus for a H.S. course on academic literacy, as well as reading assessment tools.

Tovani, C. I Read It, But I Don't Get It. Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishing, 2000.
In a clear and compelling voice, Cris Tovani describes how she explicitly teaches reading comprehension strategies to her struggling H.S. students. The author has been a staff developer as well as H.S. teacher, and has a wealth of teaching tools and instructional practices to share with her readers. The lively anecdotes from her own experience make the teaching practices come alive.

Over the years, I have tried many different methods to keep track of what my students read outside of class. In an effort to impart the importance of reading at home, I have asked my students to keep reading logs, reading charts, and a variety of other elaborate formats. I was wholly unsatisfied with each one of them. In the end, they all became just a list of what the children read and for how long. None of these assignments were tools for improving my instruction.

Try as I might, I could not find a way to connect with my students about what they read at home. The methods I had used made me feel like a policeman for their reading habits. I was about to give up when I decided to try reading journals one more time. This time, however, I designed a format for the students to write and reflect about their reading. I wanted to connect the journals to the strategies I was using in all of my other literacy instruction, and to create a common language for talking about books with my students. I developed a framework based on the writing of Ellin Keene, author of Mosaic of Thought, that scaffolds students' thinking about their reading and pushes them to think more deeply. It is written as a key that they use to structure and guide their writing:

I: Important things about what they are reading
P: A prediction they might have
S: Something that surprised them
Q: Questions that they have
V: Visualization, or the pictures that come into their mind as they read
C: Something that confuses them
TS: Text to self, or how what they are reading relates to them
TT: Text to text, or how what they are reading relates to another book
TW: Text to world, or how what they are reading relates to their world

My students now write in the new reading journals once a week about the books they are reading at home. They write as if they are writing me a letter, and each week, I respond with a letter of my own. The language I use as a scaffold in these journals is the very same language I use in the rest of my reading instruction. This language has already generated some powerful conversations. In my letters, I ask questions about what they are thinking, strategies they may or may not be using, and how they feel as a reader. At first, my students wrote to me following the format I provided, but not necessarily going very deep into what they read. It took a few entries from me to get them comfortable with the kind of thinking I hoped to get them to do.

The students' journals are a great pleasure for me to read and write in. Instead of "one more thing" I have to do, I look forward to reading and responding in my students' journals. They have become a wonderful, intimate communication with my students that has helped foster a love of reading. They have also become one of the best ways that I have found to support and challenge all of my students with their reading, no matter what their reading ability is. The journals have given students a forum where they feel safe to stretch their thinking and enthusiastic about sharing their thoughts. My students now hover over me while I write in their journals and are anxious for me to read what they have written.

When I first started the reading journals, I was concerned that I would have to read all the books that my students were reading, because I wondered how I could respond to a book I did not know anything about. I found out as we went along that being unfamiliar with the books was not a disadvantage at all. In fact, it opened up opportunities for rich conversation with my students. The fact that I did not know a book gave me the opportunity to ask questions that went beyond simple comprehension and toward thinking about the author's craft.

For example, I asked one of my students, who had been reading several of the Animorphs books, what was so good about them and why he was reading so many. I wrote: "So tell me, if the Animorphs have the same formula -- by formula I mean they have a certain similarity in plot, characters, problems etc. -- what makes it interesting to read more than one?"

He wrote back: "They are formula books, but it is better to read more than one because you know more about the BIG plot, but not much about the little plot. You know enough about the BIG plot to understand the little plot. To understand it more, Jen, READ IT!"

As I read a progression of my students' writing about the books they read at home, I can get a good idea of what strategies work best for them. One student, when writing about Matilda, by Roald Dahl, wrote:

"I: I think that it is important that Matilda reads and is smart and she makes her mom and dad crazy. V: I make a picture in my mind about when the Trunchbull is whipping people, or should I say children? Q: Does Matilda even have magic in this book?"

The journal allows me to ask her questions about this book, and gives me a good picture of how her reading is going at home. I can read predictions one week and inquire about whether they came true or not a few weeks later.

Sometimes reading journals allow me an opportunity to help with a simple problem that a student may not be willing to share in another context. For example, in one struggling student's journal, I asked her how she felt her reading was coming along. She responded, "I feel comfortable, but I keep losing my space when I read and that gets on my nerves."

The next week, I suggested that instead of her finger, she use a bookmark to keep track. When she turned her journal in again, I asked her if she was still having trouble holding her place. She responded, "Good because I have a bookmark. I don't need my finger anymore because I have the bookmark."

My students surprise me with thoughtful questions that allow me the opportunity to have terrific conversations. In the middle of a sentence about the book she was reading, one student wrote, "and Jen, do you have this problem where you really like a book and then there's this other book that's really good too?"

We wrote to each other about books we love to read and ways to choose a book so you don't end up trying to read too many.

Other times, I can ask questions about strategies students use when reading. I asked a student, "When a book is too hard, how do you know?"

She wrote the next week, "How I can tell if a book is too hard is I start reading the first page and if there are a lot of words I can't read, it's too hard for me."

This gave us the opportunity to write to each other about book choice and strategies to use when she is reading something challenging. I asked another student a related question, "What do you do when you are confused, or something you are reading is hard?"

The next week, she wrote, "Jen, I do two things when that happens. The first thing I do is read the part over and over again until I get it. If that doesn't work, I ask my mom and dad."

I was then able to talk to her about some other strategies that also work for understanding something hard. It also gave me the chance to ask her questions about the kind of books that were confusing for her.

For the most part, my students have really enjoyed this framework for their reading journal. One student wrote without prompting from me, "I like doing my reading journal because it helps me understand the book."

There are some who have not found the key useful. One student wrote, "Jen, I don't like this TT, TS, TW stuff but I'd rather just tell you what I'm reading." The fact that the structure I set up for the students did not work for her was not a problem. We have still been able to have rich, written conversations about what she is reading. Reading journals provide multiple opportunities that allow my students to write their thoughts about what they are reading.

These conversations with my students are highly valued by all of us. They have become an important part of our classroom culture. I started reading the journals during my students' silent reading times, because several of my students were asking if I would read what they wrote to me right away. They are very excited to share their thoughts and pick up their journal immediately after I have written in it. This has become an intensely personal and intimate dialogue between my students that we all cherish.

Even though the dialogue in the journals is a private one between each student and myself, the conversations we have spill into our classroom culture. The framework that I use for the reading journals has become our common language. I have such a wealth of wonderful information about each of my students as readers that I can use that information to guide my instruction. I can gauge what strategies are making sense for my students and which ones are not. I can also identify themes that my students are writing about and use those as part of my mini-lessons. For example, if I read in the journals that many of my students are writing about making predictions and then seeing if they are right, this is a terrific opportunity for me to use a whole-group instruction time to talk about making predictions and enhancing comprehension. I can also use the journal information to connect students who are reading the same kind of books with each other. I am able to help my students make meaningful connections about the reading they are doing in class and at home. These journals have fostered a love of reading and an excitement for talking about books in a way that I had not been able to do before.