Author: Debbie Miller
Format: Paperback
Published: Stenhouse Publishers, 2002

Welcome to Debbie Miller's real classroom where real students are learning to love to read, to write, and are together creating a collaborative and caring environment. In this book, Debbie focuses on how best to teach children strategies for comprehending text. She leads the reader through the course of a year showing how her students learn to become thoughtful, independent, and strategic readers. Through explicit instruction, modeling, classroom discussion, and, most important, by gradually releasing responsibility to her students, Debbie provides a model for creating a climate and culture of thinking and learning. She includes: techniques for modeling thinking; specific examples of modeled strategy lessons for inferring, asking questions, making connections, determining importance in text, creating mental images, and synthesizing information; how to help children make their thinking visible through oral, written, artistic, and dramatic responses to literature; and how to successfully develop book clubs as a way for children to share their thinking.