Yellow Brick Roads

Do you spend your days working with students who struggle to comprehend reading in literacy and content classes? Are you looking for a way to establish comprehensive literacy instruction in your school or classroom so all students receive support in becoming competent and confident readers?

In Yellow Brick Roads: Shared and Guided Paths to Independent Reading, 4-12, Janet Allen offers research-based methods for helping teachers move toward these goals. This book provides research, practical methods, detailed strategies, and resources for read-aloud, shared, guided, and independent reading. In addition, Janet outlines solutions for many of the literacy dilemmas that teachers face every day:

• Understanding what gets in the way of reading
• Rethinking and reorganizing time and resources
• Providing support for content literacy
• Developing assessment practices that inform instruction
• Supporting reading as a path to writing instruction
• Establishing professional communities to support individual and school-wide needs-based research

The appendixes include graphic organizers to support strategy lessons, suggestions of titles for building classroom libraries, as well as web sites and professional resources that support the teaching of reading.

Yellow Brick Roads will give you rich ideas, detailed strategies, and literature support for implementing those strategies. At a time when many are looking for that elusive wizard to solve students' reading problems, this book helps you create your own paths to effective literacy environments.

Janet Allen (EdD, University of Maine) spends her time researching, writing, and consulting with schools and teachers who are changing their literacy practices. An award-winning teacher, she taught high school English and reading for twenty years in rural Maine, eventually leaving her classroom to teach English education courses as an associate professor at the University of Central Florida. Janet helped create the Orange County Literacy Project, directed the Central Florida Writing Project, and currently works with districts implementing large-scale literacy initiatives. Her first book, It's Never Too Late: Leading Adolescents to Lifelong Literacy, was published in 1995. Stenhouse published There's Room for Me Here: Literacy Workshop in the Middle School, co-authored with Kyle Gonzalez (1998), and Words, Words, Words: Teaching Vocabulary in Grades 4–12 (1999).