No More Fake Reading

How can we inspire reading and critical thinking in a time of widespread student distraction and disengagement? Berit Gordon helps bridge the gap between theory and action with classroom-friendly strategies that work. Test them out, and like me, you may find your students begging for more time to read. -- Jessica Miller, English Teacher and Literacy Coach After attending an eye-opening workshop with Berit Gordon, I followed her lead and tried something new with my Freshmen College Prep Students. I'd been teaching Great Expectations to this age group for years and it was always a challenge for them and for me. The assigned nightly reading went unread, and if they did read, they did not understand it. Every day felt exhausting, as I would re-teach the previous night's assignment. This year, using Berit's ideas as a guide, I opted to use the novel as an in-class text, analyzing passages to teach close reading skills while the students chose books to read on their own ... Students delved into these high interest, contemporary books and made consistent, meaningful connections between Great Expectations and their independent novels. They wrote literary essays about their choice books, and took a test on Great Expectations, for which they received extremely high marks, demonstrating their mastery of a sophisticated (and previously dreaded!) text. The experiment was a huge success! Working through a complex text together with focused instruction enabled students to engage with a difficult book, and appreciate it in a way they never had before. Interestingly, they enjoyed Dickens so much that I taught more of the book than I had originally planned! -- Ellin Glassband, High School Teacher While I had spent over 20 years implementing book clubs and independent reading in my Language Arts classroom, I had never quite approached it in the same way Berit Gordon outlined in No More Fake Reading. Now, my students are reading at least double the previous required amount, and they are thrilled with the large amount of choice. I found it effortless to create a curriculum where I match in-class texts with independent reading. The students find the more challenging texts enjoyable when sampling them rather than haranguing through the truly difficult ones or just reading spark notes! -- Rose Leonard, English Teacher Berit Gordon is the best word whisperer, lighting a love for words in even the most reluctant of readers and writers. Her techniques created an atmosphere of electricity in a classroom that had lost its spark for communication. Many books that I've read only speak to the strategy and provide anchor charts. Berit goes further and explains the what, why, how, and when of the strategy in use. This is key. Berit is key. For many of us, we know what we want our students to do. We just need a little direction to get there. Berit provides the map, serves as GPS, and leads us to the place where our classrooms are now abuzz with engaged readers and inspired writers. -- Wendy Platt There is so much to love about this book! Grounded in the authority of classroom practice, it makes independent reading work in new ways by actively teaching and sharing how to read, and by leveraging the social power and pleasure of reading. The approach is based on an elegant principle of cognitive apprenticeship: meet students at their current state of being with their current interests and use this as the platform to help them outgrow themselves. The approach allows for authentic and democratic differentiation - through various materials, levels of support, groupings - while all students are working in complementary ways on a common project. This approach mirrors what expert adult readers do: they put texts into conversation with each other to make global meanings. -- Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Professor of English Education