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Reading Workshop

New Picturebooks for 2015

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April 15, 2015

These books will be released sometime in 2015 - Can't Wait for new titles from some of my favorite authors and illustrators!

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Building Capacity for Effective Instruction

April 19, 2014

Let me begin this post with an assertion: the quality of the classroom teacher, not the instructional program, is the primary variable in determining the effectiveness of a comprehensive reading program. This assertion is often hidden beneath the glitz and packaging of many commercial programs. It is not the quality of the wand, but the magic of the teacher that makes reading and writing come alive in today’s classrooms. In addition to this primary assertion, I would assert that no significant changes in instructional practices will occur until corresponding changes take place in one’s theoretical understandings. In other words, unless we rethink why we do what we do in the name of literacy education and instruction, most changes will be cosmetic and superficial. The resources teachers select may change, or the daily schedule may be rearranged to accommodate new program com...

Reading Workshop 2.0: Some Preliminary Thoughts

March 17, 2014

Currently, I am working on a manuscript for Heinemann Publishers on Teaching Reading in the Digital Age. Here are some thoughts as I begin to write this books: I have been reading and writing about workshop approaches to reading instruction for the past 25 years. One might think that I should have run out of things to say about these instructional approaches and classroom frameworks a long time ago. Alas, that is not to be. I seem to have a few more things to say about the changes that have taken place in literacy education, in particular the changes in technology and digital resources that have affected the ways we teach children to read and write and how we organize classrooms to support this endeavor. Drawing on my previous work on the Reading Workshop (Serafini, 2001, 2008), this book will provide teachers and literacy educators with a new vision for the reading workshop, new resources for instruction, discussion, and analysis of texts, and some new ways to think about supporting s...

Some Thoughts to Start 2015

January 17, 2015

Great literature doesn’t tell us how to act, or what to think, or whom to become. Rather, great literature offers us choices and insights into how we might act, who we might become, and what we might think. The ambiguity inherent in great literature should not be seen as a hurdle to overcome, but as an opportunity for disrupting our traditional and stereotypical ways of thinking. By tolerating the ambiguity inherent in quality literature, we postpone or suspend the closure of our thinking, providing time and space for considering new and alternative ways of thinking. The most important thing readers should get from reading a book is the desire to read another. As teacher, we cannot allow school to squash this desire. By not allowing readers to ever choose what they read, by making them do mindless activities after they finish reading, and by giving them quizzes in the name of comprehension assessment, we drive the desire to become a reader further and further underg...

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Dr. Frank Serafini: Dr. Frank Serafini is an award winning children’s author and illustrator, a landscape photographer, a literacy researcher, and a Professor of Literacy Education and Children’s Literature at Arizona State University. Frank was awarded the Arbuthnot Award from the International Reading Association as the Distinguished Professor of Children's Literature and the Distinguished Educator Award from the International Visual Literacy Association, Frank has published seven books with Heinemann Publishers including: The Reading Workshop, Lessons in Comprehension, Around the Reading Workshop and Classroom Reading Assessments. Frank’s new book is entitled: Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacies with Teachers College Press. In 2008, Frank began writing and illustrating a series of non-fiction picturebooks focusing on nature with Kids Can Press. The Looking Closely series contains books about the desert, garden, pond, rainforest, shore and forest. In 2009, Looking Closely Along the Shore won an International Reading Association’s Teachers’ Choice Award, and Honorable Mention from the Society of School Librarians International.

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