How easy it is to get into an emotional rut. To get stuck in preparing lesson plans and tests. To mistake busyness for well-being. It's time to step back, reflect, and refresh. And there's no better way to do it than by reading master teacher and author Don Graves.

In Teaching Day by Day, Graves exhibits the same uncommon insight, unwavering support, and unbounded hope for the future that made his best-selling book The Energy to Teach such an inspiration to teachers. Filled with anecdotes, classroom events, and reflectionsone for each of the 180 school days each chapter is about a page long and ends with a simple statement to ponder. Open the book and find Graves at this best in:

• stories, poems, and classroom situations that will make you laugh, cry, or question your own teaching
• portraits of children, teachers, administrators, and parents
• personal and professional reflections by Graves on his own teaching, his family, and major events in education, especially testing.

Donald H. Graves was a pioneer in literacy education who ultimately revolutionized the way that writing is taught in the United States and around the world. The research study he began in the 1970s at the Atkins Academy, a rural New Hampshire elementary school, would transform writing instruction and launch a new kind of resource: professional books for educators. His bestselling book, Writing: Teachers and Children at Work, challenged teachers to let children's needs and interests, not mandates, guide instruction. For the first time, young children became engaged as writers - not just students learning to write. As they were guided to make the decisions writers make in an authentic writing process, they raised our beliefs about what young writers were capable of. Don Graves was a teacher, principal, Education Director, and Co-Director of an urban teacher preparation program. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of New Hampshire . Heinemann proudly published Don's many other titles including A Fresh Look at Writing; A Sea of Faces; The Energy to Teach; Teaching Day By Day; and Inside Writing (coauthored with Penny Kittle). Children Want to Write: Don Graves and the Revolution in Children's Writing, edited by Thomas Newkirk and Penny Kittle, pairs Don's most important writings with recovered video from his classrooms, creating a vivid and surprising portrait of the man still referred to as "the Don." NCTE's Donald H. Graves Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Writing is given annually to deserving educators who have shown exemplary understanding and insight on student improvement in writing. For additional information about Don Graves, see: - Where It All Started by Tom Newkirk - A True Friend & a Good Writer by Nancie Atwell - The Teacher as Learner: The Research of Donald Graves by Mary Ellen Giacobbe