If you are an elementary teacher who struggles with struggling readers, Curt Dudley-Marling and Patricia Paugh provide you with quick, effective answers to your toughest questions. They draw a roadmap that leads you away from a deficit-based approach toward child-centered practices that give you the time and space to meet every student's needs.
To achieve in language arts, troubled readers require frequent, explicit, and individualized aid backed by ongoing assessment, and there's no better structure within which to balance this type of intensive instruction with other students' needs than the reading workshop. Dudley-Marling and Paugh describe how to focus on the challenges of struggling readers by setting up a workshop and conducting its minilessons in ways that give you the time and flexibility needed to provide children with specialized attention. From read-alouds to continuous assessment to differentiated teaching, the authors' ideas are ready-to-use and proven effective at boosting the reading abilities of developing readers. Plus A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Readers has a complete discussion on how to help students even when you are locked into a basal program.
If you, like tens of thousands of teachers, want a way to teach struggling readers that emphasizes students' capabilities rather than their deficiencies, read A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Readers. You'll discover a humane approach that values all children equally and builds on successes, so that our most challenged readers get all the attention they need-and deserve.
About the Author: Curt Dudley-Marling is a professor in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, where he teaches courses in literacy and language arts. His research interests focus on struggling readers and writers, the social construction of learning identities, and the potential of high-expectation curricula with low-achieving students. He is the author or coauthor of a number of books with Heinemann, including A Family Affair (2000); Readers and Writers with a Difference, Second Edition (1996); Who Owns Learning? (1994); When Students Have Time to Talk (1991); and the James N. Britton Award-winning Living with Uncertainty (1997). Most recently, Curt has coauthored with Patricia Paugh A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Readers (2004) and A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Writers (2009).
Patricia Paugh is an assistant professor in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research interests include school-university research partnerships, equitable access to academic literacy, critical literacy, and the value of practitioner research in teachers' professional development. Pat has also published several articles based on collaborative research projects with classroom teachers in urban public schools. Most recently, Patricia has coauthored with Curt Dudley-Marling A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Readers (2004) and A Classroom Teacher's Guide to Struggling Writers (2009).
