Disrupting Thinking Why How We Read Matters

In their hit books Notice and Note and Reading Nonfiction, Kylene Beers and Bob Probst showed teachers how to help students become close readers. Now, in Disrupting Thinking they take teachers a step further and discuss an on-going problem: lack of engagement with reading. They explain that all too often, no matter the strategy shared with students, too many students remain disengaged and reluctant readers. The problem, they suggest, is that we have misrepresented to students why we read and how we ought to approach any text - fiction or nonfiction.

With their hallmark humor and their appreciated practicality, Beers and Probst present a vision of what reading and what education across all the grades could be. Hands-on-strategies make it applicable right away for the classroom teacher, and turn-and-talk discussion points make it a guidebook for school-wide conversations. In particular, they share new strategies and ideas for helping classroom teachers:

--Create engagement and relevance
--Encourage responsive and responsible reading
--Deepen comprehension
--Develop lifelong reading habits

“We think it’s time we finally do become a nation of readers, and we know it’s time students learn to tell fake news from real news. It’s time we help students understand why how they read is so important,” explain Beers and Probst. “Disrupting Thinking is, at its heart, an exploration of how we help students become the reader who does so much more than decode, recall, or choose the correct answer from a multiple-choice list. This book shows us how to help students become the critical thinkers our nation needs them to be."

Kylene Beers is an award-winning educator and is the author of When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do, Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading, Adolescent Literacy: Turning Promise into Practice, and Elements of Literature, the literature textbook read by the majority of middle school and high school students across the US. She began her teaching career in 1979 in the Alief School District, outside of Houston. Texas. Since then, she has become an internationally-known and respected authority in literacy education. Beers works tirelessly to help parents, teachers, and national policy makers understand how to best help struggling readers. In 2008-2009, she served as President of the National Council of Teachers of English and in 2011 she received an NCTE Leadership Award. She has served as a consultant to the National Governor’s Association Education Committee, was the editor of the national literacy journal Voices from the Middle, taught in the College of Education at the University of Houston, held a reading research position in the Comer School Development Program at Yale University School of Medicine, and has most recently served as the Senior Reading Advisor to the Reading and Writing Project at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Robert Probst, Ed.D., is an author and consultant to schools nationally and internationally. He speaks to administrators and teachers on literacy improvement, particularly issues surrounding struggling readers and meeting standards. Bob is Professor Emeritus of English Education at Georgia State University and has served as a research fellow for Florida International University. He has served as a member on the Conference on English Board of Directors, an NCTE journal columnist, and a member of the NCTE Commission on Reading. In 2004 he was awarded the NCTE Exemplary Leadership Award presented by the Conference on English Leadership.