Doug Buehl has been a teacher, professional development leader, and adolescent literacy consultant during his over 40 years in education. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with an undergraduate double major in history and political science, and subsequently earned a Masters degree in literacy. During his 33 years in the Madison Metropolitan School District in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, Doug was a social studies teacher, reading teacher, and reading specialist at Madison East High School and a district literacy support teacher for 13 middle schools and four high schools. In addition to presenting literacy workshops, his experiences include collaborating with teachers as a school literacy coach, teaching struggling readers, coordinating a schoolwide content area tutoring program, teaching college-preparatory advanced reading, and teaching night school students returning for their high school diploma. He was recognized by the district with a Distinguished Service Award, and was named district high school teacher of the year in 1990.
Doug is the author of the best-selling Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning, 4th Edition(International Literacy Association [ILA], 2014). He was coauthor of Reading and the High School Student: Strategies to Enhance Literacy (Pearson, 1st Edition 2003; 2nd Edition 2007) and Strategies to Enhance Literacy and Learning in Middle School Content Area Classrooms (Pearson, 3rd Edition 2007). He was a regular columnist on learning strategies for the Wisconsin Education Association Council for nearly two decades and has authored numerous articles and chapters. He served for five years as the first editor of the adolescent literacy newsletter The Exchange, published by the ILA Secondary Reading Interest Group.
Doug has been an active literacy professional at the local, state, and national levels. He was a founding member of ILA’s Commission on Adolescent Literacy and was a member of the interdisciplinary task force that drafted the national Standards for Middle and High School Literacy Coaches (2006), a joint collaboration between ILA, the National Council of Teachers of English, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Science Teachers Association, and the National Council for the Social Studies. He served terms as president of the Wisconsin State Reading Association, the ILA Secondary Reading Interest Group, and the Madison Area Reading Council. Doug served as cochair of the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Adolescent Literacy Task Force, which issued its policy recommendations in 2008.
Doug was the 1996 recipient of ILA’s Nila Banton Smith Award, awarded to an outstanding secondary literacy teacher, and was inducted into the Wisconsin State Reading Association’s Friends of Literacy Hall of Fame in 2000. In 2015 Doug was one of three inaugural recipients of the Thought Leader in Adolescent Literacy award, presented by the International Literacy Association Secondary Reading Interest Group.
Doug has been an educational consultant and has worked extensively with teachers at state, national, and international levels. He has been an instructor of undergraduate- and graduate-level courses in adolescent literacy at Edgewood College in Madison for nearly two decades. Doug is the parent of two sons: Jeremy, a social studies teacher at Madison East High School, and Christopher, a biochemist currently pursuing a doctorate in cell and molecular biology at Michigan State University. Doug lives in Madison with his wife, Wendy, a professional violinist and former middle and high school orchestra teacher. Their two grandchildren, Tripp and Maggie, frequently insist on a read-aloud from a good book.
