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Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want and Why We Should Let Them
The book is divided into two parts: Part One provides an in-depth exploration of the nature and variety of the pleasure avid adolescent readers experience through their out-of-school reading. Part Two identifies and explains the genres teen readers most enjoy—romance, vampires, dystopian fiction, and science fiction/fantasy. The authors explore what we can learn from teens’ pleasure reading and the implications for instruction in this era of Common Core State Standards. They also suggest ways to make pleasure more central to the work we do in schools. For use with Grades 6 & Up.
192 pages, Paperback
First published December 15, 2013
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July 12, 2016
I was asked to review this book. The main professional hat I wear is English educator, which means I prepare undergraduate and graduate students to teach grades 6-12 English, primarily in the Chicago area.
I love the look and feel of this book. The book design has pizazz about it, and speaks to pleasure, which is an importantly lacking dimension of the current educational enterprise (especially in the last twenty five years, including the US Common Core State Standards that privileges argument over narrative, and non-fiction over all other reading. which has naturally led to declining English education majors (my own program is a third of the size it was ten years ago) and in some areas of the country, teacher shortages. Standardized education and spending inordinate amounts of time preparing people to pass multiple choice tests so each child can be assigned a score so their school can be ranked by the state is the only thing administrators and business people value about school. Why would anyone want to go into teaching English if that is all it is about? If it doesn’t have anything to do with the pleasures they experience in reading, with passionate engagement with texts and language and stories?
And the basic point of the book insofar as the title announces it—Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want And Why We Should Let them—is one I passionately affirm. Teachers and students are not robots. Many teachers have ideas and frameworks worth sharing. Great teachers have inspired us all in various ways. We can learn from great teachers, but great teachers in my view also learn from students, and don’t just inflict their ideas and ways of reading and standards or models for reading on their passive students as The One Truth. There’s a range of great books, and greatness is, after all, an individual issue and not one of a canon created by the professoriate. Goodreads itself stands as testimony to the various pleasures of the text, from Proust to L’Engle to Alan Moore to (fill in your favorite kinds of books here).
Wilhelm and Smith {and I should say I know both authors; one was a colleague of mine, the other my student} cite Roland Barthes early on, to my cheering: “Pleasure, however, is not an element of the text, it is not a naïve residue; it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial. And it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality.” Here, here, I said, hoping the whole book would follow Barthes’s lead. Nevertheless, the authors spend most of their time focused on elements of the text by which readers—readers they interviewed about their personal reading choices—derive pleasure, traditional dimensions of texts taught in school: Themes, characters, plot structures. Pleasure, for Smith and Wilhelm, is primarily intellectual, it’s work. They do talk briefly about the value of play, but they spend more than half of the book delineating the pleasures of particular genres their student respondents enjoy: romances, horror, vampires, dystopian fiction, Harry Potter. And I do love all those genres, and I love the close reading of great writing, all the rich textures of Great Books and experimental comics and poetry, but there is something about the physical, the visceral experience of reading the authors and their research don’t seem to touch on.
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” Emily Dickinson
Reading with your body, reading with your life, is what my idea of subjective or reader response approaches to reading are about. Surely those include intellectual pleasures, but I also think reading pleasures are not limited to the intellectual, to analytic pleasure. Emotional, psychological, psychic dimensions of reading are also important. For students, one’s personal relationship with the text may be more important than anything else.
You read with your mind, yes, there’s joy in analysis, but you also read with your body, physically connecting the text to your life and various worlds you live in. Pleasures of texts are sometimes visceral, something thrilling to language and surprise, to being seduced by the text, but sometimes the pleasures of seduction have little to do with identifiable and logically defined categories. The only coding category they came up with close to seduction and personal engagement is “play” but they emphasize work and intellectual work at that over play, finally. And the social pleasure of reading such as one can experience in a good classroom discussion or right here on Goodreads. But for me your private experience of a book trumps what can be learned about it and spat back to a teacher on a scantron test.
"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer,"
Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
I wanted more theorizing about the nature of pleasure in reading, the importance of finding yourself in the text, and that perfect silence. I wanted them to attack standardized approaches to reading a little more, too through their embrace of choices. To talk about why, if choices are crucial, whole-group discussions must be supplanted by individual or small group discussions from time to time. If choice is important in text selection, what might an English classroom look like? What does a teacher become? How can students feel more like their interests and needs are part of the classroom? How can they see the classroom as theirs and not just the teacher’s? Choices, I agree with the authors. Let them read what they want as I do!
Here’s what Doris Lessing says about reading:
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag--and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ”
And to conclude with yet another dimension of another kind of pleasure of the text, again from Barthes:
“What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading." Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text
You in part shape the text. As Foucault said, the author is dead as soon as the text is written. You, at least in part, write the text as you read. That is part of the pleasure of some reading experiences.
I liked this book, I really did, but I also liked battling with it a bit to help me think of what I think about these things, too.
I love the look and feel of this book. The book design has pizazz about it, and speaks to pleasure, which is an importantly lacking dimension of the current educational enterprise (especially in the last twenty five years, including the US Common Core State Standards that privileges argument over narrative, and non-fiction over all other reading. which has naturally led to declining English education majors (my own program is a third of the size it was ten years ago) and in some areas of the country, teacher shortages. Standardized education and spending inordinate amounts of time preparing people to pass multiple choice tests so each child can be assigned a score so their school can be ranked by the state is the only thing administrators and business people value about school. Why would anyone want to go into teaching English if that is all it is about? If it doesn’t have anything to do with the pleasures they experience in reading, with passionate engagement with texts and language and stories?
And the basic point of the book insofar as the title announces it—Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want And Why We Should Let them—is one I passionately affirm. Teachers and students are not robots. Many teachers have ideas and frameworks worth sharing. Great teachers have inspired us all in various ways. We can learn from great teachers, but great teachers in my view also learn from students, and don’t just inflict their ideas and ways of reading and standards or models for reading on their passive students as The One Truth. There’s a range of great books, and greatness is, after all, an individual issue and not one of a canon created by the professoriate. Goodreads itself stands as testimony to the various pleasures of the text, from Proust to L’Engle to Alan Moore to (fill in your favorite kinds of books here).
Wilhelm and Smith {and I should say I know both authors; one was a colleague of mine, the other my student} cite Roland Barthes early on, to my cheering: “Pleasure, however, is not an element of the text, it is not a naïve residue; it does not depend on a logic of understanding and on sensation; it is a drift, something both revolutionary and asocial. And it cannot be taken over by any collectivity, any mentality.” Here, here, I said, hoping the whole book would follow Barthes’s lead. Nevertheless, the authors spend most of their time focused on elements of the text by which readers—readers they interviewed about their personal reading choices—derive pleasure, traditional dimensions of texts taught in school: Themes, characters, plot structures. Pleasure, for Smith and Wilhelm, is primarily intellectual, it’s work. They do talk briefly about the value of play, but they spend more than half of the book delineating the pleasures of particular genres their student respondents enjoy: romances, horror, vampires, dystopian fiction, Harry Potter. And I do love all those genres, and I love the close reading of great writing, all the rich textures of Great Books and experimental comics and poetry, but there is something about the physical, the visceral experience of reading the authors and their research don’t seem to touch on.
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?” Emily Dickinson
Reading with your body, reading with your life, is what my idea of subjective or reader response approaches to reading are about. Surely those include intellectual pleasures, but I also think reading pleasures are not limited to the intellectual, to analytic pleasure. Emotional, psychological, psychic dimensions of reading are also important. For students, one’s personal relationship with the text may be more important than anything else.
You read with your mind, yes, there’s joy in analysis, but you also read with your body, physically connecting the text to your life and various worlds you live in. Pleasures of texts are sometimes visceral, something thrilling to language and surprise, to being seduced by the text, but sometimes the pleasures of seduction have little to do with identifiable and logically defined categories. The only coding category they came up with close to seduction and personal engagement is “play” but they emphasize work and intellectual work at that over play, finally. And the social pleasure of reading such as one can experience in a good classroom discussion or right here on Goodreads. But for me your private experience of a book trumps what can be learned about it and spat back to a teacher on a scantron test.
"When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer,"
Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
I wanted more theorizing about the nature of pleasure in reading, the importance of finding yourself in the text, and that perfect silence. I wanted them to attack standardized approaches to reading a little more, too through their embrace of choices. To talk about why, if choices are crucial, whole-group discussions must be supplanted by individual or small group discussions from time to time. If choice is important in text selection, what might an English classroom look like? What does a teacher become? How can students feel more like their interests and needs are part of the classroom? How can they see the classroom as theirs and not just the teacher’s? Choices, I agree with the authors. Let them read what they want as I do!
Here’s what Doris Lessing says about reading:
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag--and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. ”
And to conclude with yet another dimension of another kind of pleasure of the text, again from Barthes:
“What I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading." Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text
You in part shape the text. As Foucault said, the author is dead as soon as the text is written. You, at least in part, write the text as you read. That is part of the pleasure of some reading experiences.
I liked this book, I really did, but I also liked battling with it a bit to help me think of what I think about these things, too.
July 17, 2016
If you need research to back up your gut feeling that students will get more out of books that appeal to them, and especially from books that they have chosen themselves, this is the book! It also fits in very nicely with reader-centred libraries. I found the chapters on the benefits of specific genres particularly interesting.
May 24, 2014
As a teacher and a mom, I have long held the belief that kids need the freedom to choose their own reading material in order for them to develop a lifelong love of reading. This book not only confirms that belief, but also supports it with research and survey results from young readers.
I know when I was in high school I hated being assigned books to read for class, and would often find ways to get around actually reading it - even though I was an avid reader. Now, as a mother of two teens and an 11 year-old, I see the same reluctance to read school-assigned books in my own kids. I have to hound my oldest daughter all summer long to read the assigned books, even though she can sit down and devour a novel of her choice in a day. As a teacher, I understand the need for students to read complex texts, especially in light of the academic expectations and demands of the Common Core standards, but there has got to be a better way to engage and guide students toward a deeper intellectual connection with literature without completely distinguishing a child's love of reading.
Reading Unbound presents the research and findings of Jeffrey D. Wilhelm and Michael W. Smith that support the idea that kids need to have freedom of choice in what they read in order to develop a love of reading and also to promote a deeper understanding of texts that they personally connect to. A substantial portion of their findings came from adolescent readers whom they surveyed about their reading habits, preferences, and their comprehension and connection to the texts they read by choice and those that they were assigned. As you can imagine, students preferred to read books of their choosing rather than those that they were assigned, but what was most compelling about their research was the amount of intellectual work and pleasure that these kids derived from reading books that we might look on as not being "academic." Not only were they enjoying the books at face value, but they went deeper with the texts - connecting ideas and situations to their own lives - and used the story as a way to develop their own sense of themselves.
As a teacher, one of the ideas that I liked the best was using the older classics as a way to connect to popular literature of today and explore the changing (and sometimes persistent) values and beliefs of the past versus the present. Even though this book was aimed at teachers of adolescent readers, I can still apply it to how I approach the teaching of literacy to my younger students.
I know when I was in high school I hated being assigned books to read for class, and would often find ways to get around actually reading it - even though I was an avid reader. Now, as a mother of two teens and an 11 year-old, I see the same reluctance to read school-assigned books in my own kids. I have to hound my oldest daughter all summer long to read the assigned books, even though she can sit down and devour a novel of her choice in a day. As a teacher, I understand the need for students to read complex texts, especially in light of the academic expectations and demands of the Common Core standards, but there has got to be a better way to engage and guide students toward a deeper intellectual connection with literature without completely distinguishing a child's love of reading.
Reading Unbound presents the research and findings of Jeffrey D. Wilhelm and Michael W. Smith that support the idea that kids need to have freedom of choice in what they read in order to develop a love of reading and also to promote a deeper understanding of texts that they personally connect to. A substantial portion of their findings came from adolescent readers whom they surveyed about their reading habits, preferences, and their comprehension and connection to the texts they read by choice and those that they were assigned. As you can imagine, students preferred to read books of their choosing rather than those that they were assigned, but what was most compelling about their research was the amount of intellectual work and pleasure that these kids derived from reading books that we might look on as not being "academic." Not only were they enjoying the books at face value, but they went deeper with the texts - connecting ideas and situations to their own lives - and used the story as a way to develop their own sense of themselves.
As a teacher, one of the ideas that I liked the best was using the older classics as a way to connect to popular literature of today and explore the changing (and sometimes persistent) values and beliefs of the past versus the present. Even though this book was aimed at teachers of adolescent readers, I can still apply it to how I approach the teaching of literacy to my younger students.
October 25, 2016
“Reading is declining as an activity among teenagers. Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers. The percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period. Yet the amount they read for school or homework (15 or fewer pages daily for 62% of students) has stayed the same.” National Endowment for the Arts, To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence (2007).
High school teacher librarians, like myself, don’t need to see the statistics to know the sad truth: reading for pleasure drops dramatically when students are in high school. My years preparing for and teaching English followed by my transition to the library classroom were motivated by my belief in the power of reading – the power of books!
"But even if you believe strongly in the power of reading, you still have to recognize that all reading may not be equally powerful" Wilhelm & Smith, (8).
Wilhelm & Smith’s Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want and Why We Should Let Them (2014) presents a compelling argument for student choice in reading. It lays out case studies of real students sharing their reading habits to demonstrate the varieties of reading pleasure and convincingly argues how valuable and beneficial those reading pleasures can be. For as long as I’ve been a reader, and a teacher of reading, certain types of literature have been marginalized. Those marginalized texts are often what bring our students the most pleasure and schools have not given pleasure the attention it deserves.
Reading Unbound offers a review of the literature, which supports the authors’ own research over the past two decades, to support the radical notion that we should allow young adults to read what they want. This book offers useful principles for making pleasure more central to our practice, making interpretive complexity equal to text complexity in our lessons, and implementing student opportunities to engage with literature and with one another in the classroom.
If you need a reminder of the joys of reading, if you need arguments to support your own intrinsic knowledge that kids should be able to read what they want, then read this book! Reading Unbound has inspired me to advocate for more student ownership in reading choices at my school, and it has given me tools to convince my administrators and peers of the value of pleasure reading.
High school teacher librarians, like myself, don’t need to see the statistics to know the sad truth: reading for pleasure drops dramatically when students are in high school. My years preparing for and teaching English followed by my transition to the library classroom were motivated by my belief in the power of reading – the power of books!
"But even if you believe strongly in the power of reading, you still have to recognize that all reading may not be equally powerful" Wilhelm & Smith, (8).
Wilhelm & Smith’s Reading Unbound: Why Kids Need to Read What They Want and Why We Should Let Them (2014) presents a compelling argument for student choice in reading. It lays out case studies of real students sharing their reading habits to demonstrate the varieties of reading pleasure and convincingly argues how valuable and beneficial those reading pleasures can be. For as long as I’ve been a reader, and a teacher of reading, certain types of literature have been marginalized. Those marginalized texts are often what bring our students the most pleasure and schools have not given pleasure the attention it deserves.
Reading Unbound offers a review of the literature, which supports the authors’ own research over the past two decades, to support the radical notion that we should allow young adults to read what they want. This book offers useful principles for making pleasure more central to our practice, making interpretive complexity equal to text complexity in our lessons, and implementing student opportunities to engage with literature and with one another in the classroom.
If you need a reminder of the joys of reading, if you need arguments to support your own intrinsic knowledge that kids should be able to read what they want, then read this book! Reading Unbound has inspired me to advocate for more student ownership in reading choices at my school, and it has given me tools to convince my administrators and peers of the value of pleasure reading.
October 15, 2017
What Donalyn Miller’s started in “The Book Whisperer” Wilhelm & Smith have followed with a shout too big to be ignored.
I remember some controversy about “The Book Whisperer” as it wasn’t “real” research even though she did reference some studies. For those who want a detailed literature survey of research, Wilhelm & Smith have done that. They begin with extensive references to studies to support their project. Then they were able to quantify responses made by adolescents describing their experiences when reading for pleasure. Their study, conducted with middle and high school students, presents a mix of empirical research and anecdotal evidence.
Part 1 of the book provides a detailed, in-depth discussion of “The Nature and Variety of Reading Pleasures.” Numerous works about reading and learning from researchers and educators all the way back to John Dewey in 1913 are referenced and explored.
For those who want a simple explanation of why students read romance, vampire, horror, dystopian, and Harry Potter books, Part 2 devotes an entire chapter to each of these genres, dreaded by teachers & parents yet embraced by adolescents.
I found the absence of an index annoying, but references are included.
As soon as I picked this up, I recalled Stephen Krashen’s “Free Voluntary Reading” (Libraries Unlimited, 2011) which provides similar evidence of the power of student choice in reading through a short collection of previously published articles. He adds to the strong pillar of voices speaking for our youngsters.
I heard Jeff speak about “Reading Unbound,” and was amazed at the insights he and Michael uncovered in their work that resulted in this book. As a school librarian, I never questioned or doubted the importance of students having the freedom to choose their own books but could never ‘prove’ it by citing verse and chapter of research. Now, all I have to do is refer naysayers to Miller, Krashen, and Wilhelm & Smith. Hopefully they will be convinced by at least one of the these soft or powerful voices.
I remember some controversy about “The Book Whisperer” as it wasn’t “real” research even though she did reference some studies. For those who want a detailed literature survey of research, Wilhelm & Smith have done that. They begin with extensive references to studies to support their project. Then they were able to quantify responses made by adolescents describing their experiences when reading for pleasure. Their study, conducted with middle and high school students, presents a mix of empirical research and anecdotal evidence.
Part 1 of the book provides a detailed, in-depth discussion of “The Nature and Variety of Reading Pleasures.” Numerous works about reading and learning from researchers and educators all the way back to John Dewey in 1913 are referenced and explored.
For those who want a simple explanation of why students read romance, vampire, horror, dystopian, and Harry Potter books, Part 2 devotes an entire chapter to each of these genres, dreaded by teachers & parents yet embraced by adolescents.
I found the absence of an index annoying, but references are included.
As soon as I picked this up, I recalled Stephen Krashen’s “Free Voluntary Reading” (Libraries Unlimited, 2011) which provides similar evidence of the power of student choice in reading through a short collection of previously published articles. He adds to the strong pillar of voices speaking for our youngsters.
I heard Jeff speak about “Reading Unbound,” and was amazed at the insights he and Michael uncovered in their work that resulted in this book. As a school librarian, I never questioned or doubted the importance of students having the freedom to choose their own books but could never ‘prove’ it by citing verse and chapter of research. Now, all I have to do is refer naysayers to Miller, Krashen, and Wilhelm & Smith. Hopefully they will be convinced by at least one of the these soft or powerful voices.
June 11, 2021
They are preaching to the choir on this one. It was good to see that studies support what I have believed about students’ reading all along. They need choice, a chance to talk, and a context that supports pleasure.
September 21, 2014
I had to read this book as a requirement for a Teaching Literature to Adolescence course. My professor is training us future teachers to see the importance in our jobs - creating lifelong readers and getting our students to be engaged in literature. I think this book has some excellent points and ways to get students engaged in their learning, the text and with each other. The authors did a study and polled some students, so there is a lot of student quotes arguing for the point they're trying to make and to get teachers and parents to understand the importance of allowing students to read what they want to and how that can be beneficial for them in the present and in the long run.
While most Literature teachers have a passion for the classics, not every student has that deep desire to dive in. Initially my thoughts on teaching was, 'teach them the good classics!' since I have been reading classics ever since I learned how to read. But this book brings up some good points that not all students are ready for that. They can be daunting and sometimes unrelatable to what the student is currently going through. By pairing it with a young adult book and engaging in activities that tie the classic with the YA work, it can create better understanding of the classic and make it more relatable and enjoyable for the students - which is key in creating an atmosphere where students are hungry to learn, not just regurgitating what they find on cliff notes or spark notes or elsewhere online.
This book also gives insight to the different types of play and work that goes into reading books and what types of books trigger what kind of engagement for the reader. It also gives great insight on how to expand upon the work or play begin done by advice on what types of activities to incorporate in the classroom setting to help spur enthusiasm and learning.
Overall, I think it was an easy read and fairly insightful. It's definitely a piece of reading for any teacher teaching literature to consider and parents who are concerned about whether or not their children should be reading/is benefiting from various texts.
While most Literature teachers have a passion for the classics, not every student has that deep desire to dive in. Initially my thoughts on teaching was, 'teach them the good classics!' since I have been reading classics ever since I learned how to read. But this book brings up some good points that not all students are ready for that. They can be daunting and sometimes unrelatable to what the student is currently going through. By pairing it with a young adult book and engaging in activities that tie the classic with the YA work, it can create better understanding of the classic and make it more relatable and enjoyable for the students - which is key in creating an atmosphere where students are hungry to learn, not just regurgitating what they find on cliff notes or spark notes or elsewhere online.
This book also gives insight to the different types of play and work that goes into reading books and what types of books trigger what kind of engagement for the reader. It also gives great insight on how to expand upon the work or play begin done by advice on what types of activities to incorporate in the classroom setting to help spur enthusiasm and learning.
Overall, I think it was an easy read and fairly insightful. It's definitely a piece of reading for any teacher teaching literature to consider and parents who are concerned about whether or not their children should be reading/is benefiting from various texts.
August 29, 2014
This book is backed by tons of research which is great to justify why kids should read for pleasure. I whole heartedly believe in the concept of reading for pleasure, but I felt this book didn't have new information for me. I already have 400+ books and counting in my middle school English classroom library and am big on reading for enjoyment. I already implement many ideas from this book into my classroom.
I do recommend this to teachers who want to change their literacy approach and for parents who want to learn about the value of reading for pleasure.
I do recommend this to teachers who want to change their literacy approach and for parents who want to learn about the value of reading for pleasure.
May 22, 2016
I tried valiantly to read this book, but it was so incredibly boring. It mostly just referred to various other studies about reading - that apparently most educators at least are supposed to already be familiar with - to back up their points. Although I agree with the premise that kids should be able to choose what they read and that reading what they like will help them become much more avid readers, the text was just so boring and dry that I couldn't make myself finish it.
July 14, 2015
Choice! Kids should have choice and a voice in what they read. On the tails of reading Donnalyn Miller's Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild, this just cements my feelings that all students can become readers.
February 2, 2015
Navel-gazing and redundant look at how Jungian psychology can apply to teens and teachers of teens as readers.
December 10, 2015
why pleasure reading matters
December 15, 2014
Probably written for justification of independent reading choices.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews