You Gotta Be the Book: Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents

This award-winning book continues to resonate with teachers and inspire their teaching because it focuses on the joy of reading and how it can engage and even transform readers. In a time of next-generation standards that emphasize higher-order strategies, text complexity, and the reading of nonfiction, "You Gotta BE the Book" continues to help teachers meet new challenges, including those of increasing cultural diversity. At the core of Wilhelm's foundational text is an in-depth account of what highly motivated adolescent readers actually do when they read, and how to help struggling readers take on those same stances and strategies. His work offers a robust model teachers can use to prepare students for the demands of disciplinary understanding and for literacy in the real world. The Third Edition includes new commentaries and tips for using visual techniques, drama and action strategies, think-aloud protocols, and symbolic story representation/reading manipulatives.

Book Features:

• A data-driven theory of literature and literary reading as engagement.
• A case for undertaking teacher research with students.
• An approach for using drama and visual art to support readers' comprehension.
• Guidance for assisting students in the use of higher-order strategies of reading (and writing) as required by next-generation standards like the Common Core.
• Classroom interventions to help all students, especially reluctant ones, become successful readers.
• Online resources, including inquiry unit templates, tools for teaching with drama, and tips for using visual techniques.

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm is an internationally known teacher, author, presenter, National Writing Project director, and distinguished professor of English Education at Boise State University. He is the coauthor of Teaching Literacy for Love and Wisdom: Being the Book and Being the Change and The Activist Learner: Inquiry, Literacy, and Service to Make Learning Matter.