"You Gotta BE the Book": Teaching Engaged and Reflective Reading with Adolescents (Language and Literacy Series)

Great book! Gave me some ideas I had not thought of before.

The product met my expectations. I used it for my class.

If you have struggling readers read this book!

Invaluable tool

At a time when countries like USA, Australia and Great Britain have registered their concern over literacy standards in schools by subjecting students to an ever increasing battery of standardised tests, it is refreshing to read a book by an experienced educator which emphasises a human and humane approach to putting the joy back into teaching reading. Jeffrey D Wilhelm's response to teaching students with reading difficulties is to make books "live" by using drama and art activities to enable readers to see and feel the text as well as to read it. He maintains that reluctant readers feel submissive to texts, seeing them as codes to be cracked rather than as containing meaningful stories and experiences. These students become so preoccupied with word identification and pronunciation that they never experience sentences and meanings. It is not until the teacher intervenes to reinforce reading with visualisation and actualisation activities that some students begin to "see" stories in their imaginations for the first time. Wilhelm's resistant students move from rejecting reading altogether as being irrelevant and boring to actively interrogating texts to check the validity of their artistic and dramatic performances - they learn to enjoy reading. It's worth wondering whether any basic skills test or comprehension activity could claim to have had that effect on even the most enthusiastic of readers. As an educator of beginning high school English teachers in Australia, I found this book to be both inspiring and topical, given the debate about literacy standards, particularly in relation to boys. One of the most frequently asked questions from student teachers returning from their practice teaching experiences is, "How do you get kids to read anything these days?" This book provides some helpful suggestions - firstly, get to know the students, without labelling them as failures, secondly don't be afraid to use texts they enjoy outside school, especially comics, and then present literature in conjunction with other forms of art so that students can see their experiences represented. Wilhelm is insistent that once students can "see" the worlds written about in literature, then they can enter the story world and from there encounter texts at gradually deepening levels of insight and enjoyment. It sounds like it might be worth a try.

Wilhelm’s “You Gotta Be the Book” is an inspired work by a writer and teacher who knows how to bring literature alive for students and readers who struggle. This is loaded with great strategies. When we have strategies to engage with a text and activate our imaginations, stories come alive. This can be very powerful. Strongly recommended.

While this is an "updated" version of the original book published 30 years ago, the research the author used has not been updated, nor have a lot of the ideas which are treated as revolutionary, but are commonplace today.

I recently went to a teacher conference here in Idaho that had Jeffrey D. Wilhelm as a guest speaker. He was phenomenal and provided great insight into teaching reading to children. I won this book as a door prize and continuously use it as a reference. This book really gives teachers some ideas into how to make reading more engaging and meaningful.