New Releases by Jan Miller Burkins

When teachers talk about what they want for students, "a love for reading" is inevitably near the top of the list. Even as they work to ensure students' continuing progress as readers, what ignites passion more than anything is the chance to instill confidence, curiosity, and joy in students. In Reading Wellness, Jan Miller Burkins and Kim Yaris will remind you why you became a teacher in the first place. They want children and teachers to thrive as readers, to feel the deep satisfaction that comes with meaningful encounters with texts. They define reading wellness as "weaving together all the facets of our reading lives ... so that we can be our best reading selves." Readers read for relaxation, for information, and for aesthetic experience, discovering favorite books and authors and learning to choose texts. For this to happen, teachers must teach in ways that create energy and enthusiasm for reading, even as they teach to required standards. Built around a framework of four intentions-alignment, balance, sustainability, and joy-Reading Wellness offers teachers a series of lessons that help children read closely and carefully while still honoring their interests, passions, and agency as readers. The lessons here, which have been field-tested in grades 1-5, are interconnected and empower classroom communities, are filled with anecdotes and insights, and are practical, sustainable, and frequently joyful. Reading Wellness encourages each teacher to shape these ideas in ways that support personal ideals and goals while nurturing a love of reading and a passion for lifelong learning. Book jacket.

In their follow-up to Reading Wellness, Jan Burkins and Kim Yaris explore how some traditional scaffolding practices may actually rob students of important learning opportunities and independence. Who's Doing the Work? suggests ways to make small but powerful adjustments to instruction that hold students accountable for their own learning. Educators everywhere are concerned about students whose reading development inexplicably plateaus, as well as those who face challenging texts without applying the strategies they've been taught. When such problems arise, our instinct is to do more. But when we summarize text before reading or guide students when they encounter difficult words, are we leading them to depend on our support? If we want students to use strategies independently, Jan and Kim believe that we must question the ways our scaffolding is getting in the way. Next generation reading instruction is responsive to students' needs, and it develops readers who can integrate reading strategies without prompting from instructors. In Who's Doing The Work?, Jan and Kim examine how instructional mainstays such as read-aloud, shared reading, guided reading, and independent reading look in classrooms where students do more of the work. Classroom snapshots at the end of each chapter help translate the ideas in the book into practice. Who's Doing the Work? offers a vision for adjusting reading instruction to better align with the goal of creating independent, proficient, and joyful readers.

"This visual user's guide for the common core state standards for languages arts aims to streamline the meaning-making process required for deeply understanding the common core standards. It is designed to serve as a tool for teachers looking to deeply understand both the letter and spirit of the common core. In it you will find suggestions to guide your own close, careful reading of the standards, as well a visual representations of each of the standards, formulated as the result of many months of careful study, which has contributed to our own deep understanding of each of the standards"--Page 5.

"Prevent guided reading from going astray in your classroom! Through the 50 years of collective experience of authors Jan Burkins and Melody Croft, you'll resolve confusion about guided reading and improve your instruction. ... With 27 strategies, you're sure to find the help you need to work through your own tricky parts as you guide groups of readers."--Publisher.

Based on her work as a literacy coach and an instructional coach, it became apparent to Jan Miller Burkins that parallels and overlaps exist in the work coaches do with teachers. Many coaches were inventing and reinventing the same tools. This repetition of effort led Burkins to compile this collection of tools and resources. The diversity of literacy coaching demands that coaches must be competent across many levels of interaction with people and must have expertise in an array of areas from communication to technology to literacy research. This resource provides specific tools and resources that respond to those needs.